“It's Not Our Responsibility, But We Need to Do Something”: Explaining Local Government Responses to the Homelessness and Housing Crises
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In the past five years, there has been a striking increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness, including unsheltered homelessness, across Canada (Infrastructure Canada, 2024). Facing this growing crisis, local governments are changing and expanding their responses. An important innovation is tiny homes, a form of deeply affordable and supportive housing for people leaving homelessness. In this brief article, I ask what explains local government's increased leadership and innovation with respect to homelessness and housing crises. Drawing on interviews and document analysis regarding the development of a tiny homes community in a mid-sized BC municipality, I identify three factors that have contributed to local government's policy innovation: 1) local officials are keenly aware of the inadequacies of federal and provincial responses and of the need for alternative approaches; 2) they hold important resources, notably local knowledge and land; and 3) they are facing pressure to respond from citizens and service providers.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".