"Why are you asking me this?" A Look at Our 2024 Tenant Satisfaction Survey

“Why are you asking me this?” A Look at Our 2024 Tenant Satisfaction Survey

July 30, 2024Super AdminComments 1

As many tenants would have noticed in this year’s Tenant Satisfaction Survey, there were a lot of questions on the background of our tenants. We asked questions about ethnicity, income, gender, and more.

While these questions were optional and anonymous like the rest of the survey, we can understand that tenants might be wondering why CCOC would ask for this information. We would like to take the time to explain why these questions are important to us, and the value they have in our ability to understand our tenants better.

CCOC’s Commitment to Creating Inclusive Projects and Spaces

Since our beginning, CCOC has always worked towards inclusivity and equity. Promoting safe, comfortable, and welcoming spaces has always been at the core of how we do things. But in 2018, we began to take a step further and truly solidify principles and practices of equity, diversity and inclusion. That year, CCOC began to work on Anti-racist Organizational Change, taking concrete steps to ensure that our organization is truly safe and welcoming for all. For example, we’ve worked to identify and dismantle barriers our tenants may face in participating in decision-making, and began providing anti-oppression training to our staff, Board, committees, and volunteers. We have also developed our own Anti-Oppression statement that you can read more about here:

Say it With Your Chest: Anti-racist Organizational Change!

Through this statement CCOC not only commits to giving space for anyone, from all walks of life, to participate in the operation of the organization, but we also solidify our commitment to everyone’s right to housing – especially those who experience structural and cultural barriers to a safe and reliable home.

Housing Today

When we talk about these ideas of anti-racism and inclusivity, it’s important to tie them to the real-life issues that are actually affecting our communities, like housing discrimination. To paint the picture of what that might look like for our communities, we may look at how the Ontario Human Rights Commission has identified specific aspects of housing discrimination. These include social assistance, sex, gender identity and/or sexual orientation, race, disability (including mental illness), age, and more.

Ottawa, along with the rest of Canada, is experiencing a housing affordability crisis. In early 2020, Ottawa City Council declared a housing emergency, pointing to an ever-increasing demand for affordable housing. In late 2023, we continued to see reports of losses in affordable rental units. Ottawa’s Social Housing Registry, the main way individuals can access housing subsidies, sees the demand of 12,000 households waiting for a rental unit at any given time. This leads to a current average wait time of 5+ years.

When we bridge these two elements together, housing discrimination and a lack of affordable housing, we can begin to see how these disproportionately impact certain communities. Here are some examples of how these two elements work to negatively impact a person’s ability to find an apartment in Canada today:

Bringing it Together

When you collect demographic information, like the type we ask for in our survey, it can help in understanding housing needs of racialized individuals and communities. Bias, intentional or not, means that not everyone receives service in the same way. Collecting demographic data allows us to analyze our survey results to better understand how people of different identities experience our services and where there might be gaps in our service provision. Identifying service gaps is the first step in advancing our efforts to create a more equitable and inclusive community and becoming more responsive to the needs of all tenants.

At the end of the day, CCOC strives to deliver the most equitable and fair services a community based, non-profit housing provider can. With the information we collect through our tenant survey, we aim to see how we are doing and where we can improve. To this end, we can look back at our Anti-Oppression Statement, and the commitments we make to one-another.

“We are committed to considering the impact of our actions and decision on each other; on CCOC tenants, staff, volunteers, and neighbours; on the many communities who share this land; and on the environment.”