The Canadian Centre for Community Renewal has released a report titled How to Break Our Housing Logjam: PPSEPs in BC’s Fraser Valley Regional District which argues that a new policy framework is required to address housing affordability in the Fraser Valley Regional District and across Canada.  In BC’s Fraser Valley, like so many other regions across the country,  growth in household income has been outpaced by rising housing prices.  Since 1992 there has been an absence of policy and strategy at the national level for affordable housing.  The authors contend that the public, private, and social economy sectors each working independently have proven to be ineffective at addressing housing affordability.  The current funding approach is fragmentary, focussing on emergency shelters and managing homelessness rather than a comprehensive framework that addresses the range of affordability challenges facing Canadian households.  Independently, each of these sectors is not capable of addressing housing affordability.  We are asked to imagine a policy framework  that taps into the strengths of each sector and provides incentives to initiate collaboration and develop cross-sector partnerships.  These partnerships are dubbed public, private, social economy partnerships, or (PPSEPs).  Such partnerships are not new, and the report gives three recent examples of successful partnerships from the Fraser Valley Regional District.  Through the development of partnerships, or networks of public, private, and non-profits, affordability challenges across the housing continuum can be addressed.  However, the authors stress that for such partnerships to become the rule rather than the exception, a national framework is required with incentives and mechanisms to stimulate collaboration between local public, private, and social economy players.  It is precisely this kind of collaboration between public, private and non-profit stakeholders that the Canadian Rental Housing Coalition is advocating for in the Canadian Rental Housing Coalition Charter.

Article: How to Break Our Housing Logjam

Report: How to Break Our Housing Logjam: PPSEPs in BC’s Fraser Valley Regional District