CAN (LET’S) is co-applicant in a submitted application seeking funding for a project entitled: Max-housing: Innovation in research toward maximization of health and economic impacts of affordable housing for people with disability experience.
“One in five Canadians have some type of disability—whether due to medical conditions or natural aging processes—and their functionalities are diverse. Persons with disability experiences (or PDE) face tremendous challenges in obtaining affordable housing that fits their functionalities. Even when housing units with some accessible features are available at an affordable rate, their surrounding environment often makes it difficult to maintain social connections and gain employment, putting them at risk of financial precarity and ill-health. Currently, however, there are significant gaps in knowledge and methodology to clearly understand the holistic needs of housing for PDE.
The Max-housing Project will develop a research tool that clarifies complex relationships between housing design and affordability, surrounding neighbourhood quality, and health and economic wellbeing of PDE with a wide range of (dis)abilities—by measuring accessibility, usability, and affordability (the trifactor) of housing.
The multidisciplinary and multi-sector partnership encompasses researchers in disciplines including urban planning, housing policy, gerontology, and environmental design, and frontline practitioners of social housing development and management, disability rights advocacy, and equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (EDIA) education. Our strategic sharing of knowledge products through webinars, meetings/symposium, website platforms with visual and accessible community-facing materials will garner an active public discourse, while conference and academic paper publications will advance research at the intersection of housing and population with disability experiences. The knowledge co-produced through the partnership can ultimately promote creation of more inclusive and resilient communities.”
Co-applicants include Creating Accessible Neighbourhoods, a planner from Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia, Community Housing Development, Executive Director of Independent Living Nova Scotia, professors and associate professors from Dalhousie University (School of Planning), Simon Fraser University (Gerontology), and Lund University Sweden (Department of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Gerontology), among others.
Fingers crossed until we hear in the Spring. We will provide the update when we hear back.