Yes, I am fortunate to work in a City that has decided, perhaps unwittingly, to provide some resources to assist community housing development - namely me and the committee I work for. Yes, a burning soul has to be in there somewhere, but, as I discussed with the Winnipeg group, part of the struggle is to find the common ground.
Social housing is and always has been marginalized - cheap housing for welfare bums.
It has rarely been seen as an asset to the community, just a source of problems, and outside of the interests of other agencies and groups. Lobbying for more social housing, in the old sense of the word, would have been useless. In very broad terms, we gave each entity the message it needed to hear to get them to support community housing issues in their own way. I think this can be done by anyone, not only a City employee. In summary, I still think that far too many social change organizations try to reinvent the wheel instead of trying to find ways to use the wheels that are already out there.