One of the Life Stories of Displacement due to hardship of living in unsafe and unsanitary housing in downtown Kitchener. Interview with Brian Doucet and podcasted by the Social Development Centre Waterloo Region. 

"I'm going to point out multiple places that used to have affordable housing, rooms to rent, um, that people could live on on a budget, on financial assistance." Walk-about interview showing places where affordable housing units disappeared and what options were left for those who had to move. Project done in partnership with University of Waterloo professor Brian Doucet, School of Planing and a number of community connectors with lived experience of poverty and exclusion. 

As winter has set, and many people are excluded from the shelters due to so called diversion programs, they sleep rough, in the tents and abandoned buildings. They are all collectively displaced into the cracks of the city. We know their stories thanks to the partnership research project with University of Waterloo School of Planning professor Brian Doucet. 

Displacement was not talked about in Kitchener-Waterloo as there were no community housing complexes being redeveloped, but a small scale, under the radar renovations and conversions of houses and low rise buildings. Through Life Stories of Displacement we are preserving some of the history of the process that has been changing the face of downtown and uptown thanks to the partnership with the University of Waterloo School of Planning. 

Life Stories of Displacement opened up a bottom up critique of our relationships and ways we see the world. The interview was recorded through a partnership between the Social Development Centre Waterloo Region and University of Waterloo School of Planning in the summer of 2019 to make sure the history or displacement is not lost. 

"Well my thoughts is that there’s a lot of people on social assistance out there needing housing, like cheap affordable housing. They’re tearing these houses down, like two and three-bedroom houses that they could rent out cheap to the low-income people... A house or even an old factory that’s closed up, and make rooms, put somebody out there for supervision, be somebody always there that – somebody so many hours there. Run the place, give everybody rooms to live in or apartments to live in. It’d be better than tearing it down, and build a big condo..." Life Stories of Displacement are made to do not let us forget how we are building our cities and to mitigate the impact on marginalized, low income population, created in collaboration with Professor Brian Doucet at the School of Planning at University of Waterloo.

"If you get a rooming house here and this guy's got a million dollar house here, right, there's going to be some push to get the rooming house out, right. Because, it's lowering his property value, right. And, you know, a rooming house it's not the greatest place in the world, but it's providing a bit of a service where people can live, right. Because, it's hard as hell to live up there right now, right." Life Stories of Displacement are made to do not let us forget how we are building our cities and to mitigate the impact on marginalized, low income population, created in collaboration with Professor Brian Doucet at the School of Planning at University of Waterloo.

We wish to stress the point that residents living on low income are a highly diverse population, and in a limited number of interviews, we encountered people who have post secondary education and are in precarious employment, homeowners, business-owners and low income earners, social assistance recipients and recipients of the Canada Disability Pension. We recorded the life stories thanks to the partnership with the University of Waterloo professor Brian Doucet and staff from St John Kitchen in the summer of 2019. We hope that a range of voices previously absent from the urban development planning strategies in Kitchener and Waterloo will be at the core of the affordable housing strategy planning in Waterloo Region.

We wish to stress the point that residents living on low income are a highly diverse population, and in a limited number of interviews, we encountered people who have post secondary education and are in precarious employment, homeowners, business-owners and low income earners, social assistance recipients and recipients of the Canada Disability Pension. We recorded the life stories thanks to the partnership with the University of Waterloo professor Brian Doucet and staff from St John Kitchen in the summer of 2019. We hope that a range of voices previously absent from the urban development planning strategies in Kitchener and Waterloo will be at the core of the affordable housing strategy planning in Waterloo Region.

Life Stories of Displacement: We wish to stress the point that residents living on low income are a highly diverse population, and in a limited number of interviews, we encountered people who have post secondary education and are in precarious employment, homeowners, business-owners and low income earners, social assistance recipients and recipients of the Canada Disability Pension. We recorded the life stories thanks to the partnership with the University of Waterloo professor Brian Doucet and staff from St John Kitchen in the summer of 2019. We hope that a range of voices previously absent from the urban development planning strategies in Kitchener and Waterloo will be at the core of the affordable housing strategy planning in Waterloo Region.