scholarly journals Innovative Affordable Housing Strategies for Vancouver

Author(s):  
Gavin Duffus

Vancouver, British Columbia is a very attractive place to live for many reasons, but the high cost of housing in this beautiful city has become a threat to the future prosperity of the region. As housing prices continue to rise and become less attainable to low and medium income earners, innovative strategies to provide new supply of affordable housing will need to be implemented. The paper outlines a variety of housing solutions that have already had success in the Vancouver area and elsewhere. Case studies are brought together in this document to highlight the potential that combining and replicating successful housing models can have for Vancouver. Through creative solutions and strong partnerships, Vancouver can become a world leader in innovative housing provision in the face of extreme market conditions and land constraints.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Duffus

Vancouver, British Columbia is a very attractive place to live for many reasons, but the high cost of housing in this beautiful city has become a threat to the future prosperity of the region. As housing prices continue to rise and become less attainable to low and medium income earners, innovative strategies to provide new supply of affordable housing will need to be implemented. The paper outlines a variety of housing solutions that have already had success in the Vancouver area and elsewhere. Case studies are brought together in this document to highlight the potential that combining and replicating successful housing models can have for Vancouver. Through creative solutions and strong partnerships, Vancouver can become a world leader in innovative housing provision in the face of extreme market conditions and land constraints.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rakibul Ahasan

Affordable housing provision has been a challenge in the United States over the past years. As housing prices increase, a high number of people cannot afford to have their housing, and most residents can only afford to live in apartments in rental areas. This problem becomes more substantial for low-income people, who cannot afford to live near their workplace. Due to this spatial mismatch, these low-income people are forced to commute longer to reach their workplaces every morning in the city of Des Moines. This highlights the importance of proximity and access to the public transport system in the city. This study examined the relationship between investments in affordable housing by a non-profit organization, proximity to public transit, and housing prices in the City of Des Moines, in 2000 and 2018.


This is the first book to treat the major examples of megadrought and societal collapse, from the late Pleistocene end of hunter–gatherer culture and origins of cultivation to the 15th century AD fall of the Khmer Empire capital at Angkor, and ranging from the Near East to South America. Previous enquiries have stressed the possible multiple and internal causes of collapse, such overpopulation, overexploitation of resources, warfare, and poor leadership and decision-making. In contrast, Megadrought and Collapse presents case studies of nine major episodes of societal collapse in which megadrought was the major and independent cause of societal collapse. In each case the most recent paleoclimatic evidence for megadroughts, multiple decades to multiple centuries in duration, is presented alongside the archaeological records for synchronous societal collapse. The megadrought data are derived from paleoclimate proxy sources (lake, marine, and glacial cores; speleothems, or cave stalagmites; and tree-rings) and are explained by researchers directly engaged in their analysis. Researchers directly responsible for them discuss the relevant current archaeological records. Two arguments are developed through these case studies. The first is that societal collapse in different time periods and regions and at levels of social complexity ranging from simple foragers to complex empires would not have occurred without megadrought. The second is that similar responses to megadrought extend across these historical episodes: societal collapse in the face of insurmountable climate change, abandonment of settlements and regions, and habitat tracking to sustainable agricultural landscapes. As we confront megadrought today, and in the likely future, Megadrought and Collapse brings together the latest contributions to our understanding of past societal responses to the crisis on an equally global and diverse scale.


Blood ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 130 (25) ◽  
pp. 2699-2708 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick G. Gallagher

Abstract The erythrocyte contains a network of pathways that regulate salt and water content in the face of extracellular and intracellular osmotic perturbations. This allows the erythrocyte to maintain a narrow range of cell hemoglobin concentration, a process critical for normal red blood cell function and survival. Primary disorders that perturb volume homeostasis jeopardize the erythrocyte and may lead to its premature destruction. These disorders are marked by clinical, laboratory, and physiologic heterogeneity. Recent studies have revealed that these disorders are also marked by genetic heterogeneity. They have implicated roles for several proteins, PIEZO1, a mammalian mechanosensory protein; GLUT1, the glucose transporter; SLC4A1, the anion transporter; RhAG, the Rh-associated glycoprotein; KCNN4, the Gardos channel; and ABCB6, an adenosine triphosphate–binding cassette family member, in the maintenance of erythrocyte volume homeostasis. Secondary disorders of erythrocyte hydration include sickle cell disease, thalassemia, hemoglobin CC, and hereditary spherocytosis, where cellular dehydration may be a significant contributor to disease pathology and clinical complications. Understanding the pathways regulating erythrocyte water and solute content may reveal innovative strategies to maintain normal volume in disorders associated with primary or secondary cellular dehydration. These mechanisms will serve as a paradigm for other cells and may reveal new therapeutic targets for disease prevention and treatment beyond the erythrocyte.


2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-157
Author(s):  
Andrea Lavazza ◽  
Mirko Farina ◽  

The current Covid-19 pandemic is illustrative of both the need of more experts and of the difficulties that can arise in the face of their decisions. This happens, we argue, because experts usually interact with society through a strongly naturalistic framework, which often places experts’ epistemic authority (understood as neutrality and objectivity) at the centre, sometimes at the expenses of other pluralistic values (such as axiological ones) that people (often non-experts) cherish. In this paper, we argue that we need to supplement such a strong naturalistic framework used to promote epistemic authority with a number of virtues -both intellectual and ethical- which include i. intellectual humility, ii. courage, iii. wisdom and cares, as well as iv. relational autonomy. To illustrate this claim, we discuss these ideas in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and analyse a set of real-life examples where important decisions have been delegated to experts merely based on their epistemic authority. We use the illustrative failures described in the case studies above-mentioned to call for a revision of current understandings of expertise (merely based on epistemic soundness). Specifically, we argue that in social contexts we increasingly need “experts in action”; that is, people with certified specialist knowledge, who can however translate it into practical suggestions, decisions, and/or public policies that are ethically more balanced and that ultimately lead to fairer, more inclusive, and more representative decisions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-313
Author(s):  
Claire Farago

Abstract Five interrelated case studies from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries develop the dynamic contrast between portraiture and pictorial genres newly invented in and about Latin America that do not represent their subjects as individuals despite the descriptive focus on the particular. From Jean de Léry’s genre-defining proto-ethnographic text (1578) about the Tupinamba of Brazil to the treatment of the Creole upper class in New Spain as persons whose individuality deserves to be memorialized in contrast to the Mestizaje, African, and Indian underclass objectified as types deserving of scientific study, hierarchical distinctions between portraiture and ethnographic images can be framed in historical terms around the Aristotelian categories of the universal, the individual, and the particular. There are also some intriguing examples that destabilize these inherited distinctions, such as Puerto Rican artist José Campeche’s disturbing and poignant image of a deformed child, Juan Pantaléon Aviles, 1808; and an imaginary portrait of Moctezuma II, c. 1697, based on an ethnographic image, attributed to the leading Mexican painter Antonio Rodriguez. These anomalies serve to focus the study on the hegemonic position accorded to the viewing subject as actually precarious and unstable, always ripe for reinterpretation at the receiving end of European culture.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-230
Author(s):  
Svitlana Ianchuk ◽  
Olga Garafonova ◽  
Yuliia Panimash ◽  
Dariusz Pawliszczy

Today’s rising housing prices in most countries worldwide have caused increasable attention to the problem of affordable housing. It is a social or ethical issue and an essential economic direction. Thus, affordable housing has great potential, influencing economic growth, labor forces, innovation, sustainable development, and an inclusive economy. Systematization of informational sources, theoretical and practical approaches for providing affordable housing, and assessing social housing needs indicated many views on this problem among scholars and policymakers. That is why marketing, management, and financial providing of affordable housing are significant mainstreams. The research aims to investigate marketing and management fundamentals of providing affordable housing in connection with funding aspects based on cross-country analysis. For achieving this target, key trends of housing market segmentation were analyzed, considering the distribution of the population by tenure status and analytical house price indicators using the data of the statistical office of the EU, the World Bank, and the OECD. The ways to promote more affordable housing by public and local authorities, private investors in affordable housing, and specific social and affordable housing market organizations were described. Main organizational forms of providing affordable and social housing were also characterized. Particular attention was paid to strategic planning for affordable and social housing, especially housing business plans or affordable housing strategy development as a priority step in marketing, management, and financial providing affordable housing. A SWOT analysis for affordable housing developments was used to show strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to the affordable housing market. To empirically confirm some relevant strengths, the impact of indicators of financial providing of affordable housing was formalized based on correlation analysis (calculating Pearson or Spearman correlation coefficients with time lags based on results of Shapiro-Wilk testing) and construction of Arellano–Bond linear dynamic panel-data regression model with checking the Sargan test of overidentifying restrictions (the sample from 25 EU countries for 2011–2019) using the Excel 2010 and STATA 14.2 software. The dynamic model made it possible to consider the share of affordable housing owners with mortgage or loan or the share of tenants, rent affordable housing at a reduced price or free. The value of GDP of the previous period affects the current situation (due to introducing lag variables and using instrumental variables or the generalized method of moments (GMM) to obtain adequate estimates). The hypothesis that an increase of 1% of the share of affordable housing owners with mortgage or loan causes the rise in GDP per capita of an average of 0.44% with a two-year time lag was empirically confirmed. An increase of 1% of the share of tenants, rent-free housing or affordable housing at the reduced price, causes the decrease of GDP per capita of an average of 0.5% with a two-year time lag. It was substantiated that governments should continue and improve their policies for financing social and affordable housing. At the same time, they should prefer affordable mortgage lending programs over programs of reduced or free rental housing. The results of this research confirm the significant drivers of policies and practices devoted to affordable and social housing, such as marketing, management, and financial providing. The presented recommendations are useful for scholars interested in this scientific field of research, public and local authorities, investors in affordable housing, and specific affordable and social housing organizations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-113
Author(s):  
Lyudmyla Alekseyenko ◽  
Oksana Tulai ◽  
Yuriy Petrushenko ◽  
Andriy Kuznietsov ◽  
Julia Derkash

The institution of home ownership provides for the functioning of affordable housing for low-income people and new groups in need of social protection, including the reintegration of migrants to new places of residence. The aim of the study is to substantiate the priorities of investments into affordable housing for internally displaced persons promoting their adaptation and social reintegration in the context of administrative-territorial decentralization.The study is based on use of empirical, economic and statistical methods, which in the process of correlation, regression and canonical analysis showed that many indicators that characterize the housing market are closely correlated with the scale and development level of administrative units in Ukraine. To characterize the state and investment attractiveness of the residential real estate market, a set of indicators was used in the modeling: population, the number of employed, household income, regional domestic product, volume of commissioned housing, construction investments, regional human development index, total housing stock, housing prices in the regions of Ukraine and Kyiv. The most significant parameter that affects the volume of housing construction is the amount of investments into per capita housing construction. The article also discusses the housing market situation, which differs in regions or some cities due to the significant differentiation of their development, which affects the ability to obtain affordable housing. The implementation of regional development programs should determine investment priorities of social protection, particularly the possibility of buy-out schemes through the mechanism of leasing of social housing by internally displaced persons. Acknowledgment This research was funded by a grant from the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine “Reforming the lifelong learning system in Ukraine for the prevention of the labor emigration: a coopetition model of institutional partnership” (No. 0120U102001).


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Scott

This article explores how longer distance cycling can advance interspecies mobility justice, a theory of (im)mobilities and justice that includes other-than-human persons and habitats as worthy of our positive moral obligations. I argue that longer distance cycling can advance interspecies mobility justice by promoting socially inclusive and ecologically good cycling practices that redress the active travel poverty of marginalized and colonized populations, while replacing rather than augmenting auto roads with active travel routes that help humans respect other species. The article theorizes longer distance cycling not as some specific number of kilometres, but rather as the social production of cycling space across gentrified central cities, struggling inner suburbs, outer exurbs and rural countrysides. To explore this argument my analysis focuses on Canada, an extreme context for longer distance cycling. I offer a comparison of two case studies, situated on the country’s west and east coasts, Vancouver, British Columbia and Halifax, Nova Scotia, drawing on an ongoing ethnographic study of cycling practices and politics in Canada.  


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document