page_title: Public housing
section_title: Canada
hierarchical_section_title: Public housing / Americas / Canada
caption_attribution_description: Jeanne-Mance housing project.
context_page_description: Public housing is a form of housing tenure in which the property is usually owned by a government authority, either central or local.
  Social housing is any rental housing that may be owned and managed by the state, by non-profit organizations, or by a combination of the two, usually with the aim of providing affordable housing. Social housing is generally rationed through some form of means-testing or through administrative measures of housing need. One can regard social housing as a potential remedy for housing inequality.
  Private housing, by contrast, is a form of housing tenure in which the property is owned by a private developer or by non-profit organizations and such, as opposed to public housing, in which a government authority usually owns the property.
  Although the common goal of public housing is to provide affordable housing, the details, terminology, definitions of poverty, and other criteria for allocation vary within different contexts.
context_section_description: In Canada, public housing is usually a block of purpose-built subsidized housing operated by a government agency, often simply referred to as community housing, with easier-to-manage townhouses. Canada, especially Toronto, still maintains large high-rise clustered developments in working-class neighborhoods, a system that has fallen into disfavour in both the United States and the United Kingdom. However, Toronto Community Housing, the second largest public housing agency in North America, has a variety of buildings and communities ranging from individual houses to townhouse communities and mid-rise and high-rise apartments in both working-class and middle-class neighborhoods that house a significant number of low-income Canadians.
  Following the decentralisation of public housing to local municipalities, Social Housing Services Corporation (SHSC) was created in the Province of Ontario in 2002 to provide group services for social housing providers (public housing, non-profit housing and co-operative housing). It is a non-profit corporation which provides Ontario housing providers and service managers with bulk purchasing, insurance, investment and information services that add significant value to their operations.
  Recently, there has been a move toward the integration of public housing with market housing and other uses. Revitalization plans for properties such as in the notorious Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, and Regent Park, Lawrence Heights and Alexandra Park in Toronto, aim to provide better accommodations for low-income residents, and connect them to the greater community. In Toronto, for instance, the aims of the reconstruction plans of Regent Park are to better integrate it into the traditional grid of streets, improve leisure and cultural amenities, and construct mixed-income buildings. However, the residents of these communities have had little effective input in the plans and have had mixed reactions to the construction.
  In 2014, Vancouver, long considered one of the least affordable cities in the world, changed the definition of social housing to mean rental housing in which a minimum of 30 percent of dwelling units are occupied by households that cannot pay market rents, due to lack of income.
caption: Habitations Jeanne-Mance in Downtown Montreal.
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