How much did your toilet bowl cost you in water yesterday? Or your kids' bathroom sink? Or your kitchen dishwashing machine? The consumption of water appliances – and how much each contributes to the monthly water and heating bill – is now tracked by individual wireless meters and displayed online for tenants in a growing number of apartment buildings, condos, coops and other multi-family complexes south of the border.  Full story »

The federal government's last budget made a serious commitment to housing – a further $320-million in 2003 added to the $680-million in funding allocated in 2001 for subsidized housing. This is a billion dollars – big money in any league – to be matched by provincial contributions. But it will build only about 20,000 new rental units of the 150,000 needed to accommodate Canada's economic growth, and even that will only happen over five years, and only for "poor" tenants.  Full story »

 Full story »

If Ontario Premier Ernie Eves makes good on his promise, today's Throne Speech may outline a provincial plan for mortgage interest income tax deductibility. This plan echoes a proposal that the federal Tories have made nationally.  Full story »

First in a series:

Canada's political leaders, appalled at the absence of affordable housing for low- and medium-income Canadians, met in Winnipeg this week to discuss how they can help.  Full story »

Neighbours don't get along. They fight over parking spaces, they fight over the way their yards are kept, they fight over new additions to their houses and they fight over the rowdy late-night parties their teenagers hold. Neighbours are so fractious, in fact, that a mini book industry exists to help sort out the differences. The latest effort comes from The Lyons Press, a New York publisher, which recently brought out a new edition of Outwitting Neighbors (223 pages, $22.95 in Canada), a book by Bill Adler Jr. first published in 1994.  Full story »

The Next City asked Finn Poschmann, a policy analyst at the C. D. Howe Institute, and Finn Poschmann, chair of research and policy development, to comment

   Full story »

We hear a lot these days about homelessness being a national disaster. What we don’t hear is that homelessness is a new phenomenon, the term was not even in common parlance until the 1980s.

We don’t hear that homelessness first came to the public’s attention during the big spending 1970s, before the recessions of the 1980s and the hard-hearted era of cutbacks in the 1990s.

Homelessness is a disaster, but it’s one of our own making. And it was brought to us by governments with only the best of intentions.  Full story »