COLUMN ONE : Slum Jewel--a Canada Triumph : The nation’s approach to providing safe, affordable housing for the poor has done much to reduce urban blight. The United States, experts say, could learn from the example.

To the extent you can find a slum in Canada at all, the downtown east side of this spectacular coastal city is a good place to look. Just a short walk from Vancouver’s heart of glistening high-rises, blocks from stunning views of the harbor and of tree-covered mountains rushing down to the Pacific, the downtown east side is, by official reckoning, the poorest urban neighborhood in Canada.

For residents of these mean streets, the average monthly income is about $400. Nine out of 10 of them get by in tawdry single-room-occupancy hotels, where “home” is apt to be a 10-by-10-foot room without so much as a hot plate.

It’s been years since most Americans have thought of government-financed housing projects as the salvation of the slums. But something along those very lines is happening here in inner-city Vancouver--a bit of urban renewal that ought to be of interest to Americans and their newly elected government, committed as it is to bringing about economic and social change.

Vancouver’s downtown east side is home to the prize-winning Four Sisters housing project, a government-subsidized architectural jewel of rooftop gardens, safely enclosed playgrounds and million-dollar waterfront views. Virtually all Four Sisters residents live below Canada’s official poverty line, and 50% to 60% have their rents subsidized.

Yet instead of attracting the gangs, drug dealers and sundry other troublemakers who seem to pop up like mushrooms after a spring rain in American housing projects, the Four Sisters is widely credited with bringing new life to this gritty neighborhood.

Since it was built, about a dozen of the dilapidated buildings nearby have been renovated and turned into stylish condominiums and lofts. Property values in the neighborhood have risen; in old warehouses where the unemployed once squatted, rising professionals are now buying $450,000 lofts. The new kid on the block is Canadian rock star Bryan Adams, who just reclaimed one of the old buildings as a recording studio.

Of the 21 unemployed single mothers who moved into the Four Sisters when it opened in 1987, all but four have found jobs. Some have even moved out of the project and into private-sector dwellings. A final measure of the project’s success: Li Ka-Shing, the Hong Kong real-estate magnate, has now hired the Four Sisters’ architects to handle his own vast real estate project, going up on an old fairground nearby.

“Social housing can be the best thing that ever happened, from the community point of view,” exults Jim Green, housing coordinator of the Downtown Eastside Residents’ Assn. and a leading force behind the Four Sisters. Standing amid the well-groomed shrubbery of a rooftop terrace and pointing at a charming, newly renovated condominium just across the street, he adds, “I can tell you, that never would have happened if the Four Sisters wasn’t here.”

The Four Sisters is just one example of housing for the poor, Canada-style. Called “social housing,” the Canadian system has done much to cut into urban blight in this country--yet it rarely gets the attention lavished on Canada’s famous universal health-insurance system.

In Canada, there are about 648,000 units of social housing; that compares favorably with the 4.3 million subsidized rental units in America, a country with roughly 10 times Canada’s population and gross domestic product. Projects have been built here for groups ranging from underemployed artists to single elderly women. And you can find social housing in any part of town in Canada--even the well-off suburbs, where no one would dream of placing a housing project in the United States.

With President-elect Bill Clinton promising to “provide decent, safe and affordable homes to all Americans,” some housing-policy experts are saying America would do well to take a careful look at social housing in Canada, a country similar to the United States in its economy, culture and home-ownership ratio.

“A good way for the next Housing and Urban Development secretary to spend a few days would be to go to Canada,” says Peter Dreier, director of housing for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, who has done an extensive comparative study of the American and Canadian systems.

Not everyone north of the 49th Parallel is as taken with social housing as is Dreier, to be sure. To the philosophically conservative, for instance, anything “social” smacks too much of, well, socialism. Landlords and developers here tend to oppose the concept, in part because the subsidized buildings it engenders are so attractive that, likely as not, they constitute a form of unfair competition.

And fiscal conservatives in Canada argue that the social housing concept is inefficient, because it hasn’t always targeted the poorest of the poor.

Yet other Canadians familiar with social housing swear by it. “One of the things that’s wrong with housing in the United States is there is no program like this one,” says the Four Sisters’ Green.

Canada’s experiment with social housing got started in 1973, a year when this country and the United States marched off in opposite directions in their housing policies. Up until then, both countries had been trying to house the poor in large-scale, government-funded, traditional “housing projects.”

What both countries came up with all too often, of course, were filthy, dangerous and decrepit “vertical slums”--hulking megaliths that spoiled whole neighborhoods and humiliated the people living in them. When officials in both countries decided that the traditional housing projects wouldn’t work, the United States tried to set things right by bringing the private sector into low-income housing--and Canada tried to fix things by creating something new, called the “social sector.”

Housing-policy experts say that the role of the social sector is one key to the success of the low-income housing model in Canada.

First, the American way: In Washington, the Nixon Administration began by offering real estate developers incentives--tax write-offs, below-market mortgages, the right to reclaim the building after 20 years--if they would build and operate low-cost housing for the poor. That system of incentives was superseded by the voucher system of the Reagan-Bush era, in which the government began giving eligible poor people rental vouchers for paying landlords.

Neither of these approaches can be called a resounding success. The Nixon-era buildings have been rolling back to their private-sector owners right on schedule, creating a constant, creeping depletion of the country’s low-income housing stock.

The voucher system, meanwhile, has simply not enjoyed funding levels to cope with the need. Figures from the Department of Housing and Urban Development show that only one in 10 eligible households has been able to get vouchers. Nor does the voucher system encourage developers to put up new units of low-income housing.

“In my mind, the United States went backward in 1973,” says David Hulchanski, professor of housing policy and community planning at the University of Toronto.

Compare that with what has happened in Canada. Here, while Washington was turning to the private sector, Ottawa was creating what Canadians call a “third sector”--neither government nor private enterprise, but the “social sector.”

The term embraces all manner of nonprofit social-interest groups, from churches to labor unions, from cooperatives to men’s clubs like the Kiwanis. The Four Sisters, for instance, is the product of a social-sector group called the Downtown Eastside Residents Assn., which consists simply of all people living in the neighborhood.

By giving all these groups a special, “third-sector” status, the government turned their members into much more than well-meaning do-gooders with hammers--it made them sophisticated nonprofit housing developers. For the past decade, almost all federal housing funds in Canada have gone to these third-sector groups, which have organized the financing and construction of hundreds of thousands of apartments.

Under the usual procedure, a nonprofit organization perceives the need to set up low-cost housing for a particular group in the area--retirees, for example, or low-income single women. The group proposes such an undertaking to the government and, if approval is granted, picks an architect and supervises the project through to the end. After completion, in some cases, the nonprofit group will act as landlord. For its part, the government guarantees the mortgage loan and also makes sure that the people who are supposed to benefit from the building can afford to live there, by subsidizing part of their rent.

Eligibility for the housing is usually determined by the sponsoring nonprofit organization, and preference is given to the poorest members of the group for which the housing is intended. Waiting lists are often long. But the middle class has been a desirable component in the housing mix too, and middle-class Canadians, recruited by the planners and lured by the promise of affordable apartments, have also moved in. All the rents are low for such no-frills housing, but those paid by the poor are lowest of all.

In the early 1980s, the social sector was erecting housing at the frenetic clip of about 25,000 new units per year. Now that budget cutting has become a national priority, the pace has slowed. But even in 1988, Canada’s social sector managed to build about 18,000 units--about as many as Housing and Urban Development subsidized that year in a country with 10 times the population.

From his perch in Boston, Dreier says he has noticed a wave of what might be called “social sector” housing activity in America: Unionized bricklayers in Boston, for instance, recently pressured the bank that holds their pension fund into providing a reduced-rate loan to build more than 200 low-rent brick townhouses. And in Nebraska, a church group called the Holy Name Housing Corp. has been hiring neighborhood residents in Omaha to rehabilitate abandoned buildings for the poor.

Yet Dreier says the Americans’ level of organization and operational efficiency is nothing like that of the official social sector in Canada.

“In Canada, the social housing groups are very sophisticated and can do big projects,” he says enviously. “They don’t have to scrounge around to make sure they get all the money they need. In the United States, there is no support at the federal level, or even at the state level, so these groups spend a lot of their time grant-grubbing. The nonprofit sector in the United States is like a crazy-quilt. It doesn’t feel like a real industry.”

If a well-developed network of nonprofit groups is one key to the Canadian housing success, another has been the commitment here to housing welfare recipients, the working poor and middle-class people together in the same buildings.

The Four Sisters is an example: It may have its share of the hard-core unemployed, but it is also home to union officials, designers and single mothers going back to school.

The mixed-income concept dates, again, back to the early 1970s, when Canadian officials were reviewing the famous failures of their traditional housing projects. They became convinced that part of their problem had been a willingness to shunt the poor off by themselves in ugly, cheap-looking, stigmatized high-rises. (One study even showed that housing-project crime rates increased in direct proportion to the number of stories.)

So the Canadian officials decided that henceforth, they would subsidize not poor-people’s high-rises but small, attractive complexes where the social classes would be mixed. The poor in each building would get rental subsidies; the rest of the tenants would not. The buildings would look nice enough that no one could recognize them from afar as the dreaded “housing projects.”

“The apartments are small; there aren’t any luxuries,” admits the University of Toronto’s Hulchanski. “But they’re not mean-spirited designs. They’re good, standard, Canadian designs. It’s healthier (than buildings where the poor are segregated). There’s a mix of different people and different lifestyles.”

Successful as the concept of mixed-income housing has been in Canada, it has recently come under fire. In an age of blooming budget deficits, critics have complained that the middle-class residents are taking up precious space in subsidized buildings that ought to be devoted to the “truly needy.” Heeding these arguments, the government began requiring in 1986 that all new buildings house the poor and the poor alone. Officials insist that design standards will remain high.

Housing-policy experts are suspicious of those claims but say it is too early to see whether the atmosphere in Canadian subsidized housing will now decline.

“The social mix issue is still an important debate around here,” says Hulchanski, who freely admits that “there is no one solution” to the North American housing crunch that will make everyone happy.

No one knows that better than the residents of social housing themselves. In Toronto, David Smiley, a free-lance photographer, lives in an unobtrusive waterfront social-housing project with his wife and their son. “Some sectors of society have seen (social housing) as a privilege,” he says. “They think social housing ought to be a gray box.”

His building, called The Arcadia, is anything but. The hallways are a bit narrow and dim, like the corridors of a college dormitory, and the floor space per apartment is decidedly small by sprawling suburban-homeowner standards.

But the apartments are attractive, with balconies overlooking a spacious park and the bustle of a small commuter airport on a nearby island in Lake Ontario. There are generous galley kitchens and big, sunny windows. The cooperatively owned building was organized by low-income artists, and people have felt free to paint their front doors, build lofts for extra sleeping space and tear out non-structural walls to make ample studios and darkrooms.

Critics of social housing see a boondoggle of gigantic proportions in subsidizing a building just for struggling artists. But Smiley says that The Arcadia has paid its dues to society by giving residents the only break that some of them ever had.

“So many women have flowered here, especially the single mothers,” he says. “Having security of housing gives you so much energy to do other things.”