reports

Social Housing in Manitoba

Winnipeg, MB, Canada: Manitoba Centre for Health Policy.

Manitoba Centre for Health Policy, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

The Manitoba Centre for Health Policy (MCHP) in conjunction with Manitoba Housing and Community Development (Manitoba Housing), Manitoba Energy, Innovation, and Mines (IEM) who maintain the database, and Manitoba Health worked collaboratively to integrate fourteen years of social housing data (1995/96–2008/09) into the Population Health Research Data Repository (Repository) maintained at MCHP. This allowed for an unprecedented opportunity to describe the population of individuals living in social housing and, through data linkage, to compare them to the rest of the province on a number of health and social indicators.

We started by investigating the overall quality of the data. Due to changes in systems and policies over time, we have concluded that data collected since 2000 are the most consistent. Of the many elements contained in these data, we believe that the information regarding when a person or family moved into a social housing unit and when they moved out were the most reliable and was pertinent to this study. While there is much more information in the database, much of it should be interpreted cautiously in the context of the policy and procedures that were in place during a given point in time.

The first three chapters of this report describe the social housing units provided by Manitoba Housing and the people living in them. The remaining chapters explore the health and social factors of individuals living in social housing compared to a cohort consisting of all other Manitobans. Despite previous limited government data on the health of people living in social housing, where possible, our findings have been compared to published research.

It is important to note that in this report we only discuss people living in social housing directly managed by Manitoba Housing. There are many other social housing locations in the province that could not be included— about 21,800 units are managed by non–profit groups or as co–ops. Person–level data are not collected by Manitoba Housing for these units, as they provide block funding to these entities.