“When We Do Evict Them, It’s a Last Resort”: Eviction Prevention in Social and Affordable Housing

Damian Collins, Esther de Vos, Joshua Evans, Meryn Severson Mason, Jalene Anderson-Baron, Victoria Cruickshank and Kenna McDowell

Housing Policy Debate, 2022, vol. 32, issue 3, 473-490

Abstract: Evictions are a common contributing factor to homelessness and are experienced overwhelmingly by vulnerable populations, including low-income households, single parents, and minority groups. At the same time, social and affordable housing providers serve increasingly vulnerable populations. Although all evictions are potentially problematic, those that occur in social and affordable housing can carry particularly severe consequences. Little research exists on evictions in social and affordable housing, and there is even less on eviction prevention practices in this sector. This project seeks to fill this research gap by exploring emerging eviction prevention practices in social and affordable housing in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Our findings show that evictions are a complicated process for both tenants and housing providers, and most commonly occur because of rent arrears. Housing providers try to prevent evictions, and toward this end, they have adopted four broad eviction prevention practices, centered on financial management, regular communication with tenants, provision of tenant supports, and community development. However, housing providers are often constrained in their ability to prevent evictions, in particular by human resource and financial limitations. These challenges lead to complex negotiations between housing providers’ social mandates to provide affordable housing to vulnerable households and their regulatory and operational environments.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10511482.2021.1900890 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:houspd:v:32:y:2022:i:3:p:473-490

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RHPD20

DOI: 10.1080/10511482.2021.1900890

Access Statistics for this article

Housing Policy Debate is currently edited by Tom Sanchez, Susanne Viscarra and Derek Hyra

More articles in Housing Policy Debate from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().