Français

A healthy home provides the foundation for health and well-being. Renters with low incomes disproportionately experience an increased burden of health inequities due to poor housing conditions, lack of housing availability and affordability, and disproportionate exposure to the risks of climate change. RentSafe, an initiative of the Canadian Partnership for Children’s Health and Environment (CPCHE), aims to address unhealthy housing conditions affecting renters by building awareness and capacity across sectors so that renters, when faced with unhealthy housing conditions, are better able to get the support they need. RentSafe aims to build proactive and collaborative systems that ensure renters have access to adequate housing, a critical step in increasing health equity and climate resilience. 

RentSafe, together with the Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA) as lead partner, is excited to announce our new funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada’s Intersectoral Action Fund to mobilize intersectoral strategies for climate resilience in low-income rental housing.

Over the next two years, RentSafe, CPCHE, and CELA are eager to work with our partners from across sectors to build on our existing work and expertise to act on several strategic opportunities that will support communities across Ontario to improve climate resiliency in low-income rental housing and advance health equity. The project will mobilize RentSafe’s established collaboration among public health, municipal services, legal aid, social services, other relevant sectors and the grounded expertise (lived and living experience) of tenants and housing providers, to build capacity and address the overlapping concerns of inadequate housing conditions, climate change, and environmental injustice including: extreme weather events (e.g. heat, flooding/mould), degraded indoor air quality due to wildfires and other sources of pollution, and cumulative health risks borne by under-resourced communities due to disproportionate exposures to the effects of climate change.

To accomplish the aims of this project, the project activities will include: 

• convening intersectoral roundtables to understand the opportunities and barriers;
• assessing promising model maximum heat by-laws and their implementation;
• developing a toolkit to identify promising practices and solutions to common barriers to climate action in rental housing; and
• coordinating a collective call for action, supporting and leveraging our networks. 

By fostering collaboration and improved regulation, such as local by-laws, this project expands upon RentSafe’s decade-long efforts to strengthen intersectoral approaches that improve prevention, remediation, reduction of exposures, and responses to conditions in low-income rental housing that threaten tenants’ health and wellbeing. The project will also further integrate community climate resilience into our ongoing work at all levels, including our community-level work with the RentSafe Owen Sound Collaborative. This project recognizes the ability of climate change to exacerbate existing inequities and the opportunity to realize the multiple benefits of climate action in rental housing.  

We look forward to collaborating with our partners to advance equity-oriented housing-based climate strategies in communities across Ontario. Reach out to Geri Blinick at geri@healthyenvironmentforkids.ca to learn more about the project and join our collaboration.