A Policy Analysis of National Occupancy Standards with a Focus on Their Impact on Women Who Have Experienced Gender-Based Violence in British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For the past three decades, National Occupancy Standards (NOS) have been the default standard used by government and non-governmental housing organizations in Canada to assess housing suitability. However, there is growing concern that the prescriptive nature of these standards limits access to housing for those most in need, including women+ who have experienced gender-based violence and their families (Knowles et al., 2019). In this paper, we draw on Ginsberg and Miller-Cribbs’ (2005) framework for policy analysis that explores the feasibility, efficacy, quality, access, and ethics of NOS. This work also draws on a feminist ethics of care framework (Tronto, 1994) that places human relationships at its centre (Walker, 2007) and critically explores the extent to which government policies effectively care for its citizens (Sevenhuijsen et al., 2003). Together these frameworks help demonstrate the limitations of NOS, and the role they play as a barrier to housing. This has important implications, especially in light of Canada’s National Housing Strategy Act that recognizes the right to adequate housing as a “fundamental human right affirmed by international law” (National Housing Strategy Act, 2019). We conclude by outlining four recommendations for future policy, including the need to recognize NOS as guidelines, create new housing suitability policies that prioritize safety, create housing suitability policies with families, and reduce family poverty. This policy analysis provides an important reminder of the need to critically examine policies that shape social work practices and the colonial and neoliberal values that are often embedded in them. Keywords: National Occupancy Standards, Gender-Based Violence, Housing Policy, Feminist Ethics of Care, Policy Analysis
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".