Slowing Down in a crisis: Lessons from the Hamilton Lab
Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash Image of a tortoise walking
This post first appeared on SI Canada’s website on January 31, 2025
When Developmental Evaluation expert, Mark Cabaj recommends a book I pay attention. As we prepared for a webinar on Evaluating Prototypes earlier this year he mentioned Sacha Haselmayer’s The Slow Lane: Why Quick Fixes Fail and How to Achieve Real Change. For anyone working in the weeds of systems change, this book is a must! And as I reflect on the ups and downs of my last 18 months facilitating the Hamilton Transit Oriented Affordable Housing Lab, I’m pulling a few gems from Haselmayer’s thesis.
I came into the Hamilton Lab in January 2023 on a steep learning curve. I didn’t know much about affordable housing nor the financing or funding landscape that could help build it. As a facilitator, it’s always a privilege to learn about multiple subject areas, foster relationships with new communities and support stakeholders in their quest to find useful ways forward.
But this privileged space is not easy to navigate. It was clear from the first meeting that the stakes were incredibly high and the flexibility to go broad in seeking solutions would not be so elastic. The direction was set: we would work together to identify and co-develop financing solutions and innovative funding pathways to preserve existing and create new affordable housing near transit corridors in the City of Hamilton, and inform the development of similar projects in other municipalities across Canada.
Boundary Setting
We would not work towards more affordable housing in general, nor tackle any other barriers to development outside financing and funding. Critically, the Lab would experiment with projects in real time – in other words – not on paper or with Lego, but with real housing projects being brought to the table by the housing providers themselves.
Hamilton, like cities and towns across Canada, is deeply committed to ending its housing crisis. The Lab’s success would be measured in units created or preserved. And for our CMHC partners, ensuring those units were transit-oriented was essential. They had learned through funding dozens of Solutions Labs that when transit is announced in any city or region, the impact on affordability is profound.
So, with all those caveats in place, why run a Lab at all? Was a multi-stakeholder, collaborative, iterative and experimental process really necessary? Survey and anecdotal feedback suggested some surprise at the need for a Lab when so much was known about the housing challenge. Yet, from my perspective, the how and the who with still needed specificity. And the Lab would prove useful in this way.
Promising Beginning
Our first workshop was in May 2023, where the City of Hamilton joined the Hamilton Community Foundation, McMaster-based research team, CHEC, the Hamilton is Home coalition, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the CMHC at CityLab. As the lead facilitator, my main objective was to foster a shared commitment to work together over the next (at least) 18 months. By all accounts, my co-facilitator Zoie Browne (LURA), SI Canada CEO Andrea Nemtin and I were successful in this regard; stakeholders left energized saying they had never all been in the same room together despite their common interests. We had identified some solution areas to delve into more deeply, articulated some principles and begun sketching a shared vision for supporting those in greatest housing need. The road ahead seemed bright.
Mucky Middle
Then we hit second workshop syndrome; something I should have anticipated but couldn’t avoid. As we delved into the details of which pathways to follow and how long each could take, energy started to flag. We did manage to sort through some of the ideas proposed in the first workshop and whittle them down, but finding clear focus was elusive.
In The Slow Lane, Haselmayer reminds the reader how long it can take to see social transformation take place: “The first insight for movements is that social change rarely happens in less than forty years.” What?? That’s more than a generation by any definition! I don’t pretend the Hamilton Lab alone is the whole housing movement, but for all of the communities working on the housing crisis, forty year horizons taste pretty bitter when people are living in precarious housing or working to support those living unhoused. Knowing it can take that long to come out of a crisis means adjusting your mindset and setting some interim goals or quick wins.
To this end, thankfully we were far from bereft of insight. We received a huge energy injection in the form of Karl Andrus, Executive Director of the Hamilton Community Benefits Network joining the core project team after workshop 1, and his partnership and participation continues to provide an out-sized impact on the journey. And while this Lab was the first affordable housing project for me, there was a wealth of experience and strong networks at the table. The Hamilton is Home community housing providers know the challenges and funding workarounds like the back of their hand, and their input has been so important. The Hamilton Lab also builds on the lessons from the Financialization of Housing (FOH) Lab and other transit oriented housing Labs that preceded it. In particular, the FOH Lab provided very strong indicators for the kinds of financing that was needed and the Hamilton community housing providers agreed.
A final few thoughts on the mucky middle as Andrea Nemtin has reminded me; the magic and difficulty of Labs is the combination of different perspectives contributing to a common challenge. During the process of narrowing to a set of “solutions” to prototype, everyone brings their own experience and ways of working to the table and combining these can feel frustrating. In the Hamilton Lab, each stakeholder was doing so much work outside of the convenings to advance affordable housing; the Hamilton Housing Secretariat had recently launched with its City mandate, Hamilton is Home was campaigning for supportive housing at the provincial level, the Hamilton Community Foundation had released its research from Brian Doucet and was developing its strategy, and the CMHC was under pressure and eager to see solutions moving forward. Holding this energy, and channeling some of it to a shared outcome was difficult, but the partners were determined and have stayed at the table throughout the whole process.
After wading through this period we discovered a focused solution in our third workshop. Transit oriented development in any region is considered a net value add for a community, but data shows us that as soon as transit infrastructure is announced, the cost of the properties in that area increase dramatically. Affordability is compromised, gentrification takes hold and people are displaced. For such a well known problem, surely somebody must have worked on this ahead of us? Indeed they have. Multiple cities in the United States have designed, introduced and funded equitable transit oriented development initiatives. There’s even a definition for it:
Equitable TOD is defined as compact, often mixed-use development with multi-modal access to jobs, neighborhood-serving stores and other amenities that also serve the needs of low- and moderate-income people. (Hersey, J., & Spotts, M. (2015). Promoting Opportunity through Equitable Transit-Oriented Development (eTOD): Barriers to Success and Best Practices for Implementation. Denver, CO: Enterprise Community Partners.)
Not only were there multiple examples to learn from south of the border, but the City of Vancouver with several partners had engaged in deep research and business planning around an almost identical approach to the one we were proposing. We jumped on a call with them to learn more about what they found, why they didn’t pursue ETOD and how they could encourage us forward.
Which brings me to my second Slow Lane principle around a service mindset: “By doing and working together, immersed in finding better ways to do what needs to be done, the kind of collective ideas begin to emerge that can lead to real change.”
This discovery and input energized the Lab team with its capacity to meet two of the needs stated earlier: 1) the ETOD approach to ensure perpetual affordability in transit oriented communities and 2) a financial product in the form of a revolving fund for pre-development and acquisition of affordable housing.
Wait: who’s with me?
Hitting the halfway point of our planned time together with this focus felt exciting. The CMHC was particularly keen on pursuing ETOD and the core project team started working on how to pitch this new planning and development approach given the various stakeholders that would need to be engaged. Working groups were drawn up to examine particular aspects of the design challenge, with questions and insights being shared with the core team to feed into the prototype.
It may have remained exciting had that third element been easier to obtain. Designing a financial product around equitable transit oriented affordable housing is helpful, but it won’t build units. The Lab still had to find a way to capitalize the revolving fund being proposed. And for some stakeholders, there was no point doing further prototyping without it.
Labs are messy because humans are messy and with so much on the line, it’s inevitable there will be points at which the direction is challenged by some participants. Some of us got very excited and wanted to move ahead with the aspects that were working. However, tensions grew as promising signals of interest on the funding front took time to materialize.
In hindsight, I think we may have rushed forward with the Equitable TOD approach without bringing all stakeholders along at the same pace. The prototype being designed needed (and continues to need) to work for Hamilton stakeholders first. Going a little more slowly at the concept stage and not over-promising on the financing front would have been helpful. Slow down to speed up. You get the idea.
And it would have helped to bring everyone along at the same pace because financing is hard! We needed all hands on deck in that regard, a true reflection of co-creation. In not being fully united, we didn’t have as much bench strength.
Why is financing an ETOAH Fund this hard?
All US-based ETOAH and ETOD funds demonstrate that you need government funding to begin to grow an affordable housing revolving fund. Somewhere around 15-25% of the Fund needs to be no-interest funding. From there, you can attract private impact investors, foundations, social finance funds and so on; but you need that initial public funding to make the fund competitive. And that doesn’t come quickly.
With time ticking away and some stakeholder patience wearing thin, we decided to hold off on elements of design and focus instead on getting that first capital in the door.
If at first you don’t succeed…
Trial and error, funding applications and pitches ensued. SI Canada leadership and the project team, working closely with the CMHC, twisted and contorted themselves to find the seed capital. No magic sauce here. And then finally it came. Not as directly or as flexibly as we may have hoped, but it allowed us to move forward with gathering interest and some commitments from other impact investors.
By this time, the lab journey was nearing its end. What began with relationship development, ideation and narrowing to a proposed solution, has now finished with a pilot close to launching. Final design sessions were held virtually in May and June for stakeholders to share their ideas for an Equitable Transit Oriented Affordable Housing Enterprise and an equitable approach to transit oriented development. These insights have all been fed into a roadmap for the journey forward.
And I don’t want to finish off this reflection without also noting that, while there may have been some (inevitable) tensions in the process, there were also many points of light. At our final gathering in June, one housing provider remarked at how meaningful the Lab had been for his work. In engaging in the collaborative process, what had been a project on the side of his desk, had now become central to his organization with a broad cohort of support around it.
The Road Ahead
The road we’ve traveled to date was a little bumpy, and to me, it’s no real surprise. The need for housing is everywhere and we all want to help find a solid way forward. While some in the Lab were focused on a national whole-system solution, the local partners, accountable to their communities, understandably wanted to focus on building units in Hamilton as quickly as possible.
I certainly learned some valuable facilitation lessons and gained some lasting relationships along the way. The commitment and passion of the stakeholders has been my greatest inspiration. The list of participants grew considerably over time and I can’t thank everyone adequately here. All that to say, I fell in love with Hamilton – again!
I closed out my participation in the Lab with some inspiring words about joy which The Slow Lane says should be your north star. Despite my new love for Sacha Haselmayer, I chose a poem from Mary Oliver this time. The work was hard and remains hard and far from certain. But there were quick wins in the form of unanticipated joys along the way. As Oliver puts it (and I have condensed):
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it.
…whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
It was a joy to work on the Hamilton Transit Oriented Affordable Housing Lab and with SI Canada as well. Thanks to all the stakeholders for taking this leap. I look forward to the pilot launch!
Learn more about the pilot, and explore the Final Lab Report and Roadmap Report, which highlight key research and strategies for advancing equitable transit-oriented development.