New Tool Links Local Candidates to Housing Policies, and to Voters

There's little that has a bigger impact on someone's well-being than the home they live in. For more than one in four Canadians who rent their housing, the monthly outlay for shelter is more than the federal Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says they can afford. Tens of thousands more individuals and households struggle simply to keep a roof over their heads. Yet what many recognize as a national housing crisis has largely been MIA from the current election campaign.

A new website launched this week by Tyee Solutions Society -- The Tyee's non-profit sister organization -- gives voters a chance to change that. The Housing Fix brings together a non-partisan collection of recent and older reporting on who's getting the rawest housing deal, who's got ideas that could help, and, in an election year, a way for voters to find their local candidates and decide which party's housing platforms best represent proposals to address the many challenges facing renters and buyers in high-stress markets like Vancouver and Toronto, but also in many other cities, suburbs and smaller communities.

Those cities face a widening gap between what working households bring in with their paycheques, and what landlords and home-sellers expect them to pay for secure housing that's right for their needs. Nationally, wages are inching up between 0.6 and three per cent a year, while home prices have soared over five per cent annually.

Vancouver's housing costs now threaten its ability to retain the young and innovative workers that its aspirations to a high-tech economy demand. When Toronto recently re-purposed athlete housing from this summer's Pan-Am games as social affordable housing, applications exceeded the number of available units by four to one.

New site for an informed vote

As Tyee Solutions Society reported earlier this year, challenges of housing cost, availability, or health and safety affect a wide spectrum of Canadians from youth to seniors, and urban settings as different as Toronto, Winnipeg and St. John's.

The society's new website is designed to help voters translate concern about their own or their community's housing situation into an informed vote on Oct. 19. It includes a concise explanation of what each of the four major English-language parties asking for Canadians' votes -- the Conservative Party of Canada, the Liberal Party of Canada, the New Democratic Party and the Green Party of Canada -- proposes to improve the situation.

It also has a useful little tool for voters to contact the major party candidates in their own riding. By entering their postal code, users are taken to a list of the candidates in the riding where they live that includes those candidates' Twitter and Facebook records, and their contact points -- email or campaign office phone number -- where those are available.

The open-source candidate-finder is powered by Open North's Represent Civic Information API. Tyee Solutions Society and OpenMedia assisted Open North with contact updates. The Tyee's Sally Poulsen updated the visual style and Phillip Smith provided updates to the Open North plugin.

Candidate tool built for sharing

The candidate-finder tool is open source, free to use and intended for sharing. It can be easily plugged into any website. If you'd like to include this plugin on your website, instructions are available on GitHub.

Tyee Solutions Society's year-long journalism initiative is supported by a number of funders including the Real Estate Foundation of B.C., the Catherine Donnelly Foundation, Vancity Credit Union, the Aboriginal Housing Management Association, the Vancouver Foundation and the Columbia Institute.

Neither Tyee Solutions Society, nor Open North, nor the project's funders advocate any particular political choice this election season. But the new site should allow voters worried about the shelter crisis facing many Canadians -- and perhaps themselves -- a better idea of who will begin to turn things around after Oct. 19.