Resilience

North America has a single-family house fixation – an abusive use of land needed for agriculture and nature. The resulting urban sprawl requires extended road, sewer, water, and utilities infrastructure. The outcome –  more land cost and infrastructure cost per housing unit equals less upfront affordability. And, extended infrastructure networks saddle communities with additional municipal […]

A Tale of Two Cities This is a Tale of Two Cities. Houston, Texas is the fourth largest city in the United States. It has a population of about 2.4 million people and Harris County about has about 4.3 million residents. Over the past ten years Houston / Harris has reduced chronic homelessness by 63%. […]

What did Finland do? As already set out in an earlier instalment, Article 19.4 of the Finnish Constitution establishes housing as a basic human right in.  Finland bases its resultant strategy on four guiding principles to eliminate homelessness: 1 – Housing enables independent Lives The homeless can go straight to living in a rental apartment […]

Think First of the Homeless When I think about places to live, I think first of the homeless. Imagine  standing on a street corner at eight o’clock in the evening with all of your earthly belongings. It is drizzling and cold. You have no where to shelter, call your own, sleep, or feel safe. Maybe […]

Community imperatives are to provide shelter, sustenance, places to work, areas to shop, and opportunities for personal growth and entertainment. But first, the basics for towns and cities. Towns and villages grew in areas where the basics to support life were plentiful. Typically, that meant good agricultural land and good access to water. Other valuable […]

I enjoy exploring towns and cities and this year we spent a month in Paris and Strasbourg. Sadly, I always expect to see some level of homelessness. However, I wasn’t ready for the number of little encampments that I saw in France this year. Tents and cardboard shelters near the Louvre, in shopping arcades, just […]

I have lamented global responses to COVID-19’s Omicron tidal wave. Criticism is easy, suggesting other strategies more difficult. However, I did commit to putting forward ideas to turn chaos into order.  Crisis management is always political Short term crisis management generally works to the political advantage of the governing party. The crisis creates opportunity to […]

The Oxford Learners’ Dictionary defines chaos in five words – a complete lack of order.  Well, a complete lack of order defines global Covid-19 responses. The scrambled reactions to the Omicron surge do not leave many world governments looking good.  Confusion I don’t know what signals your governments sent you when the Omicron variant emerged. […]

I have been struggling a bit since writing the issue that dealt  with prejudice hate, and discrimination. I just have too many interests. So, I am finding it difficult to focus on one of them. I have wanted to get back to writing about the kind of city that I would enjoy. So what to […]

I started writing these newsletters on March 13, 2020. Prudence dictated that we fly back to Canada from the UK before COVID-19 closed borders. At that time, I was concerned that we would have to live through a three to six month shut down. Well, here we are fourteen months later and we are still […]