The place of care in social housing in a neoliberal era

Abstract

The lack of affordable housing in Canada affects a growing number of female heads of single-parent families, and the current political economy presents significant obstacles to develop more social housing in response. This paper seeks to understand the extent to which new housing programmes led by community providers comply with or resist neoliberalisation. We draw on feminist ethics of care to explore and deepen the ideas, interests, institutions, and networks involved in creating social housing for female heads of single-parent families in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, Canada. The cases reveal that neoliberalisation is not eliminating care in the social housing sector. On the one hand, communities that embrace and engage with the principles of care comply with state rollback by stepping up to meet pressing needs despite the inadequacies or unavailability of public programmes. On the other hand, care ethics lead them to design programmes and spaces centred on family needs, which resist the climate that hampers social housing development and orients it toward market-driven solutions and neoliberal expectations. We conclude with a critical reflection on the inequalities in communities’ capacity to create housing with care to meet the identified needs and thereby resist the neoliberalisation of social housing.