The governance of affordable housing in Ontario: Four outcomes for homeless young people
CSA Presentation 2026
Abstract
This paper draws upon first- and second-round interviews with 54 formerly homeless young people in Ottawa, Ontario, in combination with focus group and interview data from municipal officials, youth service providers, and affordable housing providers. The young people (ages 18 to 30) are participants in longitudinal research on their pathways into affordable housing, and their social, economic, and health outcomes after housing. Here, we will trace the complex, confusing, and often perverse pathways that youth face as they navigate systems that seem designed to keep them stuck.
We will argue that the outcomes we illuminate here are consistent with neoliberal governance of the poor, steeped in a punitive welfare state which ‘rewards’ only the ‘deserving poor’ but does so in ways that reproduce their marginalization and further entrenches the inequality upon which capitalism relies. Our analysis reveals that, despite growing awareness of the housing affordability crisis, and political commitments to end homelessness, the logic of neoliberal governance instead maintains the status quo, effectively ‘warehousing’ young people into inadequate housing that permits them to survive, and disappear from visibility on the streets, but neither thrive nor move on from the inadequate housing in which they have been placed.