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Read our discussion papers, research findings, policy ideas, and other publications. Download our PDFs.
Living Together 2025: Connecting housing, social health, and resilience convened a diverse array of housing professionals, municipal planners, provincial and federal policy makers, public health professionals, architects, planners, non-profits, researchers…
What if our neighbours became sources of everyday support that could allow all of us to grow our social connectedness and resilience, while also staying in our homes longer as we “age in the right place”?
This report summarizes key learnings from HNC’s first five years of operation (2019-2024) and is organized into four parts that describes HNC’s activities and their impacts, collective learnings, and shared priorities moving forward.
Designing multi-unit housing to support wellbeing at all ages and life stages.
Our neighbours are our closest source of social support and connection. Socially connected homes and neighbourhoods nurture greater physical and mental health, community resilience, and social trust between diverse residents. …
Through its partnership with Hey Neighbour Collective, Building Resilient Neighbourhoods helped to bring Connect & Prepare to three new BC municipalities, in collaboration with resident champions, housing operators, local government emergency management and community planning staff, and non-profit organizations.
Fndings from the recently completed Hey Neighbour Collective (HNC) report ‘How sociable is life in multi-unit housing?’. This report provides aggregated and comparative results of two annual resident surveys (2021 & 2022) across the properties of HNC members Brightside Community Homes Foundation and Catalyst Community Developments Society.
Happy Cities, Hey Neighbour Collective, and SFU assessed the impact of the City of North Vancouver’s Active Design Guidelines, identifying key lessons for supporting social connection in multi-unit housing.
Happy Cities, Hey Neighbour Collective, and Simon Fraser University are working with six local governments in Metro Vancouver to co-create policies for social wellbeing in multi-unit housing.
Making Connections – a rental housing providers and neighbourly social connectedness research overview.
Design strategies and research to support aging in the right place, from a collaborative multi-unit rental building project between Happy Cities, Hey Neighbour Collective, SFU’s Department of Gerontology, Concert Properties and Brightside Community Homes.
Reflecting on HNC’s first three years, this report details activities, learnings, and shared priorities moving forward.
Canada is simultaneously experiencing a severe housing crisis and – like many other countries – a crisis of increasing loneliness and social isolation. Intervening to tackle loneliness and social isolation…
Efforts to tackle social isolation among older Canadians could produce a wealth of health and lifestyle benefits for the country’s aging population. But the National Institute on Ageing also argues…
