The Place of Social Housing in the Healthy Cities Movement
The Healthy Cities movement encourages municipalities to integrate health in a holistic and cross-cutting way to establish tangible actions to reduce health inequalities. Many Canadian municipalities within the Healthy Cities movement are currently experiencing a housing crisis that particularly affects female renters’ heads of single-parent families. This paper explores the connections between this movement and the creation of supportive housing programs through case studies in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Based on key informant interviews and document analysis, it examines the connection between these municipal strategies and the processes involved in creating social housing programs. The research also compares their vision of the contribution of these programs for health to what is described in municipal strategies. The results highlight that while social housing is part of the actions to foster healthier cities, municipal strategies only support or create coalitions that can overcome the absence or inadequacies of public programs for social housing. At the grassroots level, the housing initiatives have not been thought of as contributions to Healthy Cities, although by key informants recognize them as levers to promote the health of the few households they serve. These results suggest that the movement in Canada depends on caring communities, but more importantly, working with a network to overcome the lack of public investment to meet those needs.