‘Home is more than shelter’

Jessica Barrett is an award-winning journalist and a former senior editor at Vancouver Magazine. Her own experience with the challenges of housing affordability led her to write her first book, No Place Like Home: The Missing Key to Our Housing Crisis. She spoke to Christopher White about rising costs, community-led housing and what makes a place feel like a home.

CHRISTOPHER WHITE: Tell me about your own housing journey.

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JESSICA BARRETT: I’ve been on a similar journey as many Canadians, particularly those under 50. I moved to Vancouver for university and fell in love with it. But in our society, your only real chance at stability is to buy a home. I was this mid-30s successful journalist, renting an apartment in downtown Vancouver. I had a full-time job in my field at a high-profile magazine, yet I couldn’t see how I could stay in the city I loved and make the rent and have any kind of quality of life. So I gambled and went to Calgary, but the housing crisis is here too. It’s not just a Vancouver or Toronto thing — it’s everywhere.

I did manage to buy a house in Calgary, but that hasn’t spared us from the chaos of the housing market. Our neighbourhood is locked in battles over development proposals. The renters in our community are constantly getting evicted and pleading for places to live. The homeless population in Calgary has increased considerably since we moved here.

CW: How did housing shift from being a place to live to being a commodity?

JB: The short answer is that in Canada, it has always been a commodity. There has always been a chunk of Canadians, roughly 30 percent, that has either struggled to afford market housing or not been able to afford it at all. Our government has tried to rectify the situation by increasing the amount of debt available to people so they can continue to pay housing prices that keep trending upward.

The exception to this would be in the 1970s and ’80s, when we started to implement a serious non-market housing sector, which is co-operative housing. Over 250,000 Canadian households still live in co-op housing today. It has been the single-most cost effective and socially effective housing policy our country has ever had, and it was nixed in the 1990s and we haven’t had any since.

CW: How do we move from a market-driven model to one that works for people?

JB: Our government housing policies are overwhelmingly geared toward market policies. They are doing backflips trying to make this work: tax-sheltered savings accounts for first-time home buyers, cuts to the GST or tax rebates, favourable financing for developers. We need to take the money that’s going into market housing and put it into non-market options. If we develop a non-market housing sector, we would see a drastically different housing landscape, and it would also put us in league with many of our international peers who have social or non-market housing sectors that account for anywhere between seven and 30 percent of the housing market.

CW: You’ve looked at this issue from a global perspective. What conclusions did you draw?

JB: Non-market housing is the missing key. It needs to be an option for people. I went to Vienna, Berlin, Southern Africa and Zimbabwe and saw non-market housing work. And I discovered a model that was new to me called community-led housing. This is found in things like community land trusts, which are essentially organizations that aim to create perpetual affordability within a neighbourhood. We don’t do a lot of this right now in Canada, but the potential is there. We should also look at co-housing, which is a group of people who come together to act as developers. There’s next to no government support for these kinds of programs.

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CW: One of the projects described in the book is the Little Mountain Housing Co-operative in Vancouver. Can you talk about it?

JB: This is a newer condo building in the Riley Park neighbourhood. It was just a group of people who wanted to live together in a real community. They wanted to know that their kids could go play in the hallway and responsible adults would have eyes on them. All the nooks on all the landings outside the elevators on every floor have been modified to be community spaces. There is a community kitchen where they have meals three times a week.

CW: How do you differentiate between housing and that sense of home?

JB: Home is so much more than shelter. Our bodies need shelter, but the thing that elevates shelter to a home has almost nothing to do with the physical shape of it. It’s more about what I call the seven elements of home, and one of them is place. Do I like walking around the neighbourhood? Do I know my neighbours? Is there access to the things I need to thrive, the food I like to eat, the recreation I like to participate in? Can I easily get to work?

Other elements are more emotional and even a little mysterious. Home really is a feeling. If people don’t feel motivated to build a sense of familiarity with a place, they’re not going to get the full benefit of a home.

CW: How do we make housing work for Canadians?

JB: We need a value shift in Canada. We need to let go of the idea that the primary goal of housing is to make money. I’m not saying we can’t have a private housing market, but we can’t solve our housing crisis without a substantial investment in non-market housing.

We have this view that “my housing wealth is the result of my own hard work and effort.” And I hate to break it to people, but it’s not. It’s often the result of luck and timing. The system we were born into has got to go. And I think the way we do that is by showing people we can build something better.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Rev. Christopher White is a United Church minister in Hamilton.