One of the innovative partnerships set to answer this question started in a parking lot.
Chatting after a meeting, representatives of the Edmonton Community Development Corporation and the Social Innovation Institute realised that in order to meet their shared goal, to increase the amount of affordable housing, they needed two things: an innovative attitude and some deep dives for information about the root causes. They saw this as a space that needs more exploration; wouldn’t it be cool to do something together? At the same time, the University of Alberta got funding for innovative, community based research. In partnership with MacEwan University’s Social Innovation Institute, an institute with great strengths in prototyping and innovation, a collaborative Affordable Housing Solutions Lab was born. (This illustrates two lessons: sometimes there’s the right energy at the right time to bring together a collaboration, and sometimes the parking lot after a meeting is where the real work happens!) Recently, ABSI sat down with Rhea Kachroo, AHSL’s program coordinator to chat about the Affordable Housing Solutions Lab and what they’ve learned and done so far. We’ve turned that conversation (and Rhea’s insights into the process of social innovation) into this blog.
Round One
When the Affordable Housing Solutions Lab hosted the first round of design jams in April and May of this year, they learned about opportunities and gaps as well as chatted with individuals who have experienced the need for affordable housing solutions about what they’ve found has worked. Overall, six themes popped up again and again, such as ensuring there’s a shared definition of what affordable housing means, thinking about how COVID will continue to impact the housing sector, how we can involve the community in housing, and how we might change zoning regulations.
Following the first round of jams, the lab staff did some sense making, shared information about the lab and its learnings so far, and spent more time learning from people embedded in the field. They’ve just started a second round of design jams, which will focus on taking the learnings from Round One and identify ideas to build prototypes. What does potential policy change look like? What are tangible things that we can do that can make an impact? These discussions will feed into innovation teams who will design and test prototypes.
Collaboration: The Hard and the Easy
The most amount of work so far in the Affordable Housing Solutions Lab has been building collaboration. As principal partners, both MacEwan University and the University of Alberta have strengths they’ve been able to share; because it’s a partnership, it’s been important for both institutions to be very clear about the goals they want to achieve throughout the process. As the program coordinator, Rhea’s job, in part, has been making sure that when those goals aren’t aligned, that there are still ways to match those goals with others or ways to get them done. The two universities are not the only partners either - the Affordable Housing Solutions Lab has also been working with community partners trying innovative ideas to help satisfy affordable housing needs, like Green Violin, an Edmonton based organization trying - among other things - a seacan based affordable housing project. Finding partners willing to try new things and work together can be the easy part - building trust and transparency that helps meet goals is a bit harder.
Another hard part of building collaboration, particularly for housing related projects, are the power imbalances. Who has money to put into projects? Who decides what the goals should be? Whose voices are heard in decision making, or in feedback? Is more weight given to academic research, funders, and professionals, or to people who have lived experiences? How might we build a process based in equity? AHSL hired two facilitators who helped them design an equity guide for their process. This guide helps navigate some of the pitfalls that keep people with the most practical, hands-on experience and insights from sharing, and intentionally developing relationships and conversations with people with quiet voices and ‘low power’ in a safe way that helps centre their voices and experiences. Because AHSL is a bit separate and experimental, they’ve been able to mitigate some of the power dynamics, and adapt as they go to help make sure voices are heard within the lab.
Even still, equity is hard. It has to be kept front of mind. As social innovators or as facilitators, we need to constantly think about how we ensure equity. Rhea pointed out that we’re not always the right person to decide if the right people are in the room, and that our innovative process might not always end up looking the way we want, if it’s going to meet the needs of the participants with direct experience with the need for affordable housing. Instead, they start from ‘what do you need to help you participate?’ That may mean adjusting how and where they talk with people (especially worth noting the effect of unstable internet in COVID times). It may mean finding ways to compensate people for their time. They’ve found it helpful to work with non-profits and organizations who work to help people in need of affordable housing; these groups have relationships already with the people who have insights, and have connected AHSL with people who have time and valuable insights, or have been able to share vicarious insights.
A Bigger System
It’s important to remember that any and all work on affordable housing sits within and is surrounded by many other parts of our overall system. Affordable housing isn’t just a human services issue, which means it’s not just a human services model solution. How can we change the perception of affordable housing in developments and neighbourhoods? How can we involve the private sector? How do we tap into the knowledge that real estate agents have? How can people who need affordable housing (or who have needed it) see themselves in the projects and potential solutions? How do we know when we see a change in behaviour or attitudes around affordable housing? How can we measure the rate of policy change?
Another big piece of the affordable housing question comes down to the market; this is really apparent in Vancouver. BC Housing has some really interesting and innovative projects and ideas, and none of them will be able to fix the gap between affordability and availability until Vancouver’s housing market costs can be fixed. Right now, housing is both a financialized investment vehicle and also a fundamental human need. It’s hard for housing to be both these at once, and until we acknowledge that these two goals don’t line up, we are going to have issues at the margins.
However, thinking of housing within larger cultural, social, and economic systems can lead to some interesting questions. How might we change what ownership looks like? How can we have innovation around financing the purchase of housing? Where else in the world has a different finance model? What might we learn from housing policy in other countries and cities? What might a co-operatively owned community look like? How might owning housing without a mortgage for religious reasons work? How can we be flexible in offering different terms to ownership or renting (or blending the two in some way)? How does housing look different in really heavily populated cities around the world? What can Edmonton learn about using green spaces as community living rooms from countries like India? Can we create shared green spaces? How do we make sure there’s space for every kind of family in every neighborhood?
Homes and Labs in COVID Times
The preparation for the first round of design jams were just about complete (the sticky notes were all organized, the white boards were ready to go, the visual mapping exercises were prepped) and the labs were scheduled to start 2-3 weeks later, when everything shut down in March. That meant not only did the processes around the design labs change, but also the housing needs everyone discussed shifted as well.
In terms of the lab process and the lab design, the team thought hard about what was going to be different about working online. One of the big energizers and amplifiers in social impact lab settings is being able to visually see the conversation, move things around, and physically connect points together. That’s a little harder to do when you’re not in person. Instead, they used a Zoom whiteboard to help capture and move around sticky notes. They didn’t manage to replicate the magic of all the in-person collisions, but they did manage to add in some out-of-the-box thinking activities to help jog people’s thinking into innovative ways. People still managed to build off each other’s ideas and using breakout rooms, google docs, and online whiteboards has helped capture the learnings from the jams. One thing they noted is that synthesizing the ideas from the online sessions seems to take a lot longer than it would have from an in-person gathering.
How has the effects of Covid in terms of people staying home shifted the things people need or value in their personal spaces? The Lab heard from people about the way they’ve been using spaces within the home to differentiate between home life and work life, to ensure the lines between the two weren’t getting too blurred. Another big shift has been in the ways people connect with green spaces around their homes, and the idea that the people we live close to are the people we seem to spend time with outside. How might we create places in communities that naturally make it easy for people to connect and reduce social isolation, while also making it easy to keep safe? How do we build safety and security around housing and keeping people in homes when economic forces mean many people have insecure incomes? While many of these were already important questions, the shifts we’ve seen happen in Covid have made these questions very urgent.
What’s next for the Lab?
AHSL recently pulled together a second round of design jams to brainstorm ideas that could meet the needs discovered in the first round of design jams and in community engagement. They’re sifting through all the ideas surfaced in the second round, to identify potential solutions they can support and explore as prototypes.
To find out more about the Affordable Housing Solutions lab, or to connect with Rhea and the other staff members, visit their website here: https://www.ualberta.ca/earth-sciences/research/affordable-housing-solutions-lab/about-our-lab.html