Housing Policy for Tomorrow's Cities
[http://www.urbancentre.utoronto.ca/pdfs/researchassociates/Hulchanski_Housing-Policy-C.pdf ]
-Hulchanski :
" This ideology—that owners are better citizens than
renters—is a modern manifestation of a bias hardened in stereotypes that has misguided American public policy from colonial times to the present."
...
" They found that the home buyers were less likely to be neighborly than the continuing renters."

" homeownership fosters values of privatization that inhibit the desire for the public involvement so often deemed characteristic of homeowners (Kemeny 1981; Marcuse 1987)."

[ " In this article[The Grapes of Rent: A History of Renting in a Country of Owners], I argue that from colonial times to the present, a bias in favor of property ownership has been prominent in American public policy. Over time, this bias has manifested itself in several ways: property requirements that denied renters the rights of suffrage in colonial times, land distribution schemes that aggrandized ownership rather than settlement, and finally a variety of regressive federal and state tax policies in which homeowners and the real estate fraternity are enormously subsidized by tenants who are excluded from the largesse they help to supply." ]

"In addition, there is a pervasive cultural and institutional bias against renting in Canada, as there is in the United States. In his “history of renting in a country of owners,” Krueckeberg (1999: 26) puts the problem in the following terms: We are the inheritors of a nasty and pervasive property bias in our society with roots
that run deep, just as other strong biases of gender, race, and nationality still do in spite of our efforts to outlaw them. Our institutions and practices continue to embody and
perpetuate the property bias, particularly in the tax system—in the subsidies given to owners but denied to renters and in many of theproperty tax laws that deny that renters are stakeholders in their communities. The celebration of homeownership in the United
States stigmatizes those who don’t, can’t, or won’t buy property. What is needed, it seems, is a civil rights movement for renters.
Donald A. Krueckeberg

" The most extreme manifestation of the housing and income inequity problem in Canada is homelessness. Homelessness is not only a housing problem, but it is always a housing problem."

" About five percent of Canada’s households live in non-market social housing. This compares with 40 percent in the
Netherlands, 22 percent in the United Kingdom, 15 percent in France and Germany, and two percent in the United States (Freeman, Holmans and Whitehead, 1996)."