After decades of inaction, housing policy is at the centre for the local, provincial, and federal government agendas. This is a welcome change, but it raises a challenge: Policies and programs are usually shaped by an elite few, often with negative impacts on people directly affected. How can we ensure that housing policies reduce, rather than increase, the deep inequities across gender, race, class, disability, immigration, and other factors?

This forum will take a new approach, bringing intersectional gender equity, human rights, and lived expertise to the centre of our thinking about a key housing policy issue: Portable Housing Benefits (PHBs). 

PHBs are income supplements tenants can get to help cover the costs of rent. PHBs will be part of Canada’s new National Housing Strategy. Right now the federal and provincial governments are negotiating how this benefit will work. 

But PHBs have sometimes had good results and sometimes bad results. Their impact varies in different places and for diverse communities. This forum brings together people with lived expertise of housing issues, advocates with equity-seeking groups, and housing policy experts to share information and perspectives on PHBs, and how they can best support vulnerable people.

Questions to be considered include:

• How have PHB policies affected Black and other racialized communities in the US?
• What have we learned from Ontario’s PHB pilot for women fleeing violence?
• What implications do PHBs have for health and well-being?
• How would different PHB models impact for different equity-seeking groups?
• How can PHB benefits be a tool to create and improve non-profit housing?
• How should public policy respond to the disparities in PH benefits?