An illustration in hues of pink, brown, yellow and tan, depicting a city square with buildings, cars, people on bikes, and neighbours helping each other.

Unlocking social connections in multi-unit housing: Insights from our 2021-2022 resident surveys

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.

Multi-unit housing can be designed to meet residents’ needs at all stages of life. (Happy Cities)

Aging in the right place: Designing housing for wellbeing and older adults

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.

Building Resilient Neighbourhoods connect & prepare workshop.

Practice Guide #4: Roles for Local Government in Strengthening Social Connectedness and Resilience Activities in Multi-unit Housing

Fourth in a series of four guides from Hey Neighbour Collective about strategies and practices to increase neighbour-to-neighbour connections and social resilience among residents living in multi-unit housing.

A montage of photos showing neighbours doing interesting events, facilitated by landlords and owners.

Practice Guide #2: Landlord- and housing operator-led approaches to growing community in multi-unit housing

This guide explores many relatively easy things that residents, landlords, housing operators, community organizations, and governments can do to support residents in making activities and social connectedness happen.

Mainstreaming socially connected affordable housing illustration with people interacting with each other in the city scape..

Mainstreaming socially connected, affordable multi-unit housing across British Columbia

On September 16, Hey Neighbour Collective and Happy Cities co-hosted an online workshop to explore cultural, financial, and policy-level challenges to building socially connected, affordable multi-unit housing communities. We were joined…

A CMHC logo floats over Lions View Commons with green grass and blue sky.

Hey Neighbour Collective to benefit from CMHC support

This grant will support work from March 1st 2021 through to June 30th 2022 with four of our five practice partners. Together we’ll be exploring social sustainability innovations for affordable multi-unit rental housing. In particular, we’ll be highlighting the role that landlords, property managers and policy-makers can play in the process of building community, social connectedness and resilience in multi-unit housing contexts.