This project aims to support the sector at a time when the provincial government is poised to make major changes to its ownership, regulation, and funding of community housing. The Alberta provincial government has declared its intention to significantly reduce its role in social housing across the province by moving from being an owner of affordable housing assets, to regulating and funding housing programs only. This decision directly affects over 26,000 provincially owned housing units across the province along with the rest of the community housing sector in Alberta. The provincial government’s housing strategy will also involve focusing on encouraging collaboration or consolidation operations, updates to housing tenanting processes, rent calculations, and regulation around policy and mixed modelling.
The grant will help ASCHA to address this pivotal change in the Albertan housing sector. A series of project activities towards building Alberta’s sector capacity for resilience, sustainability, growth, and diversity are planned in this initiative.
This project will have an impact that stretches into the future, far beyond the current policy setting. It would prepare housing providers to succeed in asset transfer negotiations, avoiding the permanent loss of community housing units, and securing sustainable funding. It also recognizes that enduring transformation requires that the experiences of Indigenous tenants and the voices of Indigenous housing providers are at the core of how the sector changes and ASCHA aims to partner and co-create with providers that had their concerns routinely ignored previously by the province.