PHOTO COURTESY AVERY ALDER

Out of all the games made by queer designer Avery Alder, Dream Askew feels the most like 2021. Table-top roleplaying games like Dream Askew are a medium where game designers invent systems and worlds, and players inhabit them. Think of them like movies: Avery Alder creates the set, the costumes, and the basic outline of character tropes. But players are directing the action, writing the story, and acting as the characters themselves. In Dream Askew, the world is collapsing. Players become members of a queer enclave, figuring out what comes after the end of their world.

“Apocalypse isn’t like a singular event that’s going to visit us all at the same time,” Alder says over Zoom, from her home in Sinixt Nation territory (near Nelson) in so-called British Columbia. Instead, it’s “a function of marginalization, and it’s a function of resource access.” By re-imagining the apocalypse as waves of destruction, Alder’s game can more starkly emphasize the difference between the haves and the have-nots—those with the resources to put off the apocalypse, and those who fall prey to it. It’s a sharp critique of late-stage capitalism.

“At least since the birth of capitalism, the system has been on the verge of collapse kind of continuously,” she says while spinning slowly in her office chair. She gives the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis in the U.S. as another example of an apocalypse. “I think, in that sense, we’re in the new apocalypse every seven to 10 years,” Alder says. The current COVID-19 pandemic, to Alder, is one of a never-ending string of economic disasters. And what better way to process the end of times than by playing a game?

“I really tire of stories that are about privileged, well resourced, heroic individuals who overcome adversity,” Alder says. “I’m really interested in stories that are about social fabric, that are about relational change, and that look at power in different ways.” Her games aren’t about heroes; they’re about ecosystems.
Instead of rolling dice or having one person control what happens, Dream Askew makes all players equally responsible for creating a story. You shape the world by asking questions. People build their play-space together. And that collaboration is carried into the gameplay, where your ragtag bunch of sexually diverse misfits have to work together to survive raiders, tech problems and food instability. The community-dependence resonates more sharply with Alder now than it did when she started working on the game in 2013. Society at large changed in those eight years, as did her own situation—she moved out of the city and back to the rural Slocan Valley close to where she grew up.

“If the power grid goes out, and if things start collapsing, then [the town] has maybe 200 people,” Alder says. She means there’s a scarcity of skills as well as resources, which is reflected in the Dream Askew world. “We’re down to people that like, if Doug dies, our survivability drops. That sense of this is what we’ve got feels more real to me now,” she says.

She chose to root the game in queerness because of the communities people instinctively form. LGBTQ2S+ folks are more likely to lose family support, to be poor and marginalized, and to rely on each other to get by. “Queerness is not and cannot be separate from questions of survival, and support networks, and economics and housing,” she says. “I think queerness is like, how you cope with trauma, how you manage to feel safe in a home.”

Playing table-top games, in and of itself, is also a way Alder builds community. She cares about the physical space people share while playing her game, and the pandemic has stripped players of that real-world connection. But table-top finds a way. For some, “the proliferation of online alternatives that’s coming out of the pandemic is really relieving,” she says.

“I think it’s just leading to more play that is more enriching.”

“house” by waferboard is licensed under CC BY 2.0

In Neepawa, Manitoba—population 4,609 as of 2016—any rental unit that comes on the market is immediately snapped up.

The town’s economic development officer, Marilyn Crewe, says a pork processing plant run by HyLife Foods LP has gone from employing 350 people to 1,500 in the space of 12 years.

“You need to understand …in the ’90s, the town of Neepawa had a population of 3,500,” she says.
“What this has done for Neepawa is that it has created a very tight rental market, and a very tight housing market.

So we are continually trying to work on that as a municipality but, I mean, our vacancy rate in Neepawa is
non-existent, practically.”

The national average for rental vacancy rates in centres with populations between 2,500 and 10,000 dropped by about half since 2015, according to data released by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) in January, going from 6.4 percent to 2.5 percent. Urban centres, defined by CMHC as those with populations over 10,000, have seen only a slight decline over the same five-year period, from 3.5 percent to 3.2 percent. Manitoba has one of the lowest vacancy rates for small centres in the country at 1.9 percent, second only to Quebec at 1.5 percent.

Crewe says there needs to be flexible support from other levels of government. She recognizes her booming community is an anomaly in rural Manitoba and that a plan addressing its housing needs would not necessarily work for places that are struggling to maintain their populations.

Massive change to the local job market is only one of the possible pressures small and rural communities are wont to face, however. Catherine Leviten-Reid, associate professor in the MBA in Community Economic Development program at Cape Breton University, says there are many factors present in small markets that are not typically an issue in large cities, including resource development projects and rental housing being used by healthcare workers coming in on rotation, and other visiting workers.

“I think people may kind of fail to appreciate some of the tension in rural rental markets,” she says. “So first of all, absolutely, there are people who rent in rural areas.”

Cities face their own challenges when it comes to rental markets and housing in general—including short term vacation rentals, something both urban and rural markets share—but Leviten-Reid argues there is more information to be had about housing conditions in large centres. While CMHC releases data every year for cities with populations over 10,000, it only releases information about smaller centres once every five years.

“The alarm bells go off if there is a vacancy rate that goes down below a certain percent,” she says. “But in these rural areas, there’s no baseline. You just end up with these anecdotal stories about how the rental market is being impacted.”

Further, the rental market study conducted in smaller places only takes into account the primary market, which is apartments in buildings that contain three or more units, which are not as common in small towns as they are in larger cities.

Overall, vacancy rates in small centres have trended downwards across the board. According to CMHC data tables, the most dramatic drops were seen in Newfoundland and Labrador and British Columbia, each falling about seven percent. Prince Edward Island went from 3.9 percent in 2015 to asterisks, which indicate that data was suppressed to protect confidentiality or that the data was not statistically reliable, in 2020. Tiny sample sizes are common in data concerning places with relatively small populations.

“I think this highlights that rural communities have rental markets, which as we discussed are often ignored, and that a renter looking for a place to live in small town Nova Scotia or Quebec, for example, faces challenges in finding housing,” Leviten-Reid says. “It’s important to find out what is going on behind these numbers.”

Everybody eats, but not all experiences are reflected in food media. When Kyla Pascal and Kathryn Gwun-Yeen 君妍 Lennon started hanging out in 2018 they bonded over critiquing food magazines and television. As activists and organizers in their communities of Edmonton and Vancouver, and with long histories in the food industry, Pascal and Gwun-Yeen 君妍 Lennon decided to act instead of complaining about what they didn’t like in food media, and Hungry Zine was born.

A city’s best food and restaurants is often celebrated annually in alt-weekly publications, but instead of highlighting great eats from various communities, Pascal and Gwun-Yeen 君妍 Lennon saw an example of how marginalized communities are misrepresented. Gwun-Yeen 君妍Lennon comments on how Chinese restaurants fall under categories of best late night or hangover food and how those who are making food in those restaurants are referred to as cooks instead of chefs.

“I think that’s why this project is so exciting because instead of critiquing and seeing the things that are missing and why aren’t they better, we can try to offer an alternative model of what that could look like,” says Gwun-Yeen 君妍 Lennon.

Pascal and Gwun-Yeen 君妍 Lennon began brainstorming what their zine could look like when they saw a copy of Chinese Protest Recipes, a zine that could be purchased or downloaded and printed. They became interested in the accessibility and openness of the zine medium and in January 2021, they put out a call for submissions for the first issue. “We’re not trying to be a food industry magazine that’s about reviewing restaurants and that kind of thing,” says Gwun-Yeen君妍 Lennon. “I think by emphasizing more the literary and arts and zine aspects that kind of helps us put the focus on the community voices we’re hoping to gather.”

Showcasing marginalized voices and building relationships are the driving motivations for Hungry Zine. As food lovers who are moved to make changes around the cultural appropriation of food, Pascal and Gwun-Yeen 君妍 Lennon know that having opinions and values about who owns ethnic restaurants, who is in their kitchens, and who grows and produces food can be isolating, but as the submissions came in, they saw that other people felt like there’s a need for the type of space they’re creating. The pair looks towards the future of Hungry Zine and the launch of the home cooking issue scheduled for this spring. Pascal hopes they can “hold on to that radical, that community, that the voices are from everywhere and on topics that are so broad and diverse and interesting.”

AERIAL VIEW OF HOUSING DEVELOPMENTS NEAR MARKHAM, ONTARIO · PHOTO BY IDUKE

The excavators were a sore sight. Each machine with its little claw dug into the earth, ripping out the vegetation that grew in place of the usual rows of corn. Just like that, another piece of farmland in Markham, Ontario would be turned to houses.

“I’ve had this for eight years,” I tell my boyfriend, dismayed, that I can’t bear losing these fields. They hold an unobstructed view of the brilliant blues of the sky. On some nights the big dipper lays low, just above the clearance of the field, guiding me home. The plot of land is not much more than one kilometre—too short to fill up a whole block, but a little too long for a novice runner.

The field is a glimpse into a world that is more than just semi-detached homes and townhouses, each worth more than the average Canadian can afford. Unionglen is going to be yet another new subdivision, among the list of communities with names but no personalities: Greensborough, Wismer Commons, Upper Cornell. These subdivisions dominated the growth of Markham, a city marked by incessant urban sprawl that had devoured one farmland after another. A city with cookie cutter homes and frustrating public transit, common veins amongst many suburbs. And yet, I found home in this city.

Home is an elusive concept when you’ve lived in more than five cities before the age of 18. It wasn’t until I was on the cusp of adulthood that I finally felt firmly at home. Right here in Markham. A few years after my family relocated here from British Columbia, we moved into a new subdivision at the edge of town, surrounded by farms and other undeveloped land destined to become yet more pockets of houses.
I memorized the streets and landmarks. I knew which buses to take to get from point A to B—A being our house and B being Markville Shopping Centre, the crown jewel of the city for a 17-year-old with nothing better to do with her time. I knew the opening and closing times of all the important stores and the nearby branches of Markham Public Library. I learned that you never want to drive down Markham Road between 14th Avenue and 16th Avenue during rush hour, unless you have an extra 20 minutes to spare. If you want a quiet place to study, you go to the Angus Glen library branch or Cornell—never Miliken Mills. If you want to sit down at the food court at Pacific Mall, instead of waiting ages for a spot to open up, you take a seat at the stage even though the sign clearly says you are not allowed.

Since immigrating to Canada from southern China in 2004, my life has been a frenzy of learning a new language and blending in, so no one can pick me out from a crowd to call me an outsider. When I grew comfortable in Markham, I embraced it with every fibre in my muscles.

“What’s in Markham?” people would ask. They didn’t understand its appeal over a much more vibrant place like Toronto.
“Not much,” I’d say. “But I love it.”
But right when I finally knew what home was, I moved away again.

The next seven years were earmarked by dizzying trips between London and Markham, then Kitchener, then Windsor. I witnessed the aftermath of Markham evolving, growing bigger. Each time I returned, there was something I didn’t recognize. A Whole Foods, a Chatime, a new supermarket. Restaurants opening and closing and more houses built. Subdivisions were sold out before the foundations were even laid. I was the tetherball flying far from the pole, swinging round and round the thing I identified as home, but yet never truly returning.

I spun around the one constant: my favourite stretch of fields from Kennedy to McCowan Road. Each summer, the newly planted corn climbed upward. When I drove westward, the valleys between rows called to me to get lost in them. After a heavy snowfall, a soft blanket of white cast over the harvested field and I wondered what life would be like if I could just lay in the centre of it all.

Just before I turned 25 in 2019, I finally returned home to Markham. Like many people my age, I came back to town to mooch off my parents after my fantasies for my adulthood dissipated. The intersections and major landmarks were the same. I could still drive around without GPS and the store hours hadn’t changed. But I realized that while I was busy growing up, I was also growing apart with a different vision for my future.

My ideals are now vastly different from that of my parents, whom I had never learned to see as people and more than just parents, until a significant amount of distance was put between us. I find myself disagreeing with their views more and more, even in the ways they sometimes parent my sister who is still in high school.

I’ve turned from someone who dreamed of living in a new home in a sparkling new subdivision in a suburb just like Markham, into someone who craves a sense of community, wants to be able to walk to stores instead of drive, and uses the word “amenities” to mean something more than just a gym in a condo.
Between 2001 and 2016, Markham’s population grew by almost 58 percent. In 2016 just over 45 percent of people who call Markham home cited they are Chinese. In Markham, I am not a minority, but a majority. Yet somehow, the feeling of alienation is the same. The fields had made it feel more like home, but now they are changing too.

Unionglen will be replacing open views of the sunset. The houses will be flanked by a golf club, Markham Fairgrounds, and more fields of corn, some listed on the market, if not already sold. Its predecessor is one of my favourite things about this city. Now that it’s vanishing before my eyes, I’m forced to face the truth. I’ve outgrown Markham. While I had happily adopted Markham’s bedroom community characteristics as things to love, I’ve become disenchanted with the way it has transformed over the years.

The realization is just another confirmation of a label I’ve worn for years: a person without roots. To lose home for the umpteenth time will not hurt much more than a sting. A sting similar to the one I feel when I realize that I do not remember what China looks like beyond the apartment I lived in. Or the ping in my chest when I ponder if I will ever find a place where I know for certain that I belong.

I will be 27 soon. I moved out of my parents’ nest this year. When people ask me where I’m from, I reflexively say Markham like I have for the last decade. But each time, my answer is tinged with the heartache that the city has become just another name on the list of places I’ve lived.

Art by Valerie Thai

Residential landlords and tenants have a very specific type of business relationship: rent (money) is paid every month in exchange for goods (the rental unit) and services (repairs and maintenance). But what happens when a tenant isn’t getting their money’s worth? They can consult the Tenant Hotline, a free service of the Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations (FMTA), a tenant advocacy organization in Toronto.

Available by phone and email, the team of Hotline counsellors answers a wide range of questions on topics including repairs and maintenance, as well as illegal lease terms and evictions. The Hotline is unique in Canada for being one of the few phone-based services exclusively for tenants. Counsellors have extensive knowledge of how the law applies to residential tenancies, and can provide referrals to other helpful resources.

FMTA Executive Director Geordie Dent emphasizes that the Hotline provides legal information, not legal advice. This distinction is important because the FMTA doesn’t employ lawyers or paralegals, and the Law Society of Ontario is strict about who can give legal advice. The limits of the FMTA’s assistance can sometimes lead to difficult conversations between counsellors and tenants.

“We tell people what they can do, but not what they should do,” he says.

“That’s hard for a lot of people. They’re looking for someone to point them in the right direction, but we can’t do that.”

The Hotline assists approximately 11,000 tenants in Ontario every year, and counsellors hear daily horror stories: pest issues that become infestations, no heat during the winter, attempts to evict people with cancer, and all the ways a landlord can violate a tenant’s privacy are only some of the topics covered.
No other business relationship affects livelihoods as much as the landlord-tenant relationship, but it’s the landlord that holds the balance of power as both the owner of the rental unit and collector of rent. Knowing one’s rights shifts some of the power back to tenants, and it can mean the difference between continuing to have a home and going through a costly or time-consuming move, or even being forced into homelessness.
Empowering tenants is one of the reasons why Dent continues to do the work. “Learning when you can assert your rights is important,” he says. “Being able to push back is important.”

ILLUSTRATION BY MATTHEW DALEY

Judy Kerr was only 30 years old when she found herself living in a nursing home in 2017—unable to find accessible, affordable housing in Toronto, she had no other choice.

Kerr, who uses a wheelchair, was left unhoused after a dispute with her roommate, a renter from whom she was subletting. Unsure of where to go, Kerr spent the first night in a hotel, and on the second, went to a hospital, where she was connected with the nursing home where she spent the next three months.

At the time, Kerr’s income meant she didn’t qualify for community housing—but she was also unable to afford adequate housing in Toronto’s rental market, given the cost and scarcity of a fully wheelchair-accessible apartment. So she was stuck, like thousands of Canadians with disabilities across the country, settling for inaccessible and inadequate accommodations that worsened her quality of life.

“It definitely was challenging,” she says. “All of a sudden, because I had been moved, a lot of my caregivers couldn’t come in and help me. So I had to rebuild this team, once I did get moved to somewhere more stable.”

Later that year, when Kerr was finally offered co-op housing advertised as wheelchair-accessible, things were supposed to get easier for her. But it turned out that the co-op apartment didn’t have a roll-in shower she could use.

With this essential part of everyday life unavailable to her, Kerr had little choice but to move once again, eight months later, to the first fully accessible home offered to her next—even though her new home would be almost 120 kilometres away from Toronto, her family, and the care network and employment she had set up for herself.

That’s how Kerr ended up in Fergus, Ontario, a township of approximately 20,000 people. While her current home is fully accessible, she says her environment has worsened significantly, and the distance and income limits to qualify for the housing mean she is no longer able to work.

“I swear [Fergus] is about 20 years behind in terms of beliefs of disability—living here is the first time I felt truly disabled,” Kerr says. “There’s no accessibility resources, there’s no transportation out here.”

The Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) said in an email that of the 58,500 units they manage, approximately 14,000 have been modified in some way to be accessible, ranging from specific features to full renovations, alongside another 40 fully accessible units developed in partnership with city and private builders.

While this accessibility rate is better than other parts of the country, the problem lies in demand: there were, as of 2020, more than 81,000 people on the waitlist for social housing in Toronto, more than a third of whom are seniors who are likely to have access needs, or require features to make a space accessible.

The crisis in accessible social housing is inherently tied to housing affordability, among other factors, across the country. If people with access needs are unable to afford adequate private housing, they have no choice but to turn to publicly-owned accommodations, but those with incomes are often lower-priority on an already overburdened waitlist that ultimately fails to meet the needs of low- and middle-income people.
The resulting marginalization is doubled for women, who have higher rates of disability, and especially Indigenous women, who have higher reported rates of disability than non-Indigenous people. Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women also experience the intersection of medical racism that impacts their healthcare experiences, and housing precarity because of low wages or insecure employment.

“There’s a lack of affordable housing, there’s a lack of housing that’s not overpriced in neighbourhoods where it’s accessible for people who need services, and can’t necessarily be an hour or 90 minutes away from work, or from where they get resources like community support,” says Karine-Myrgianie Jean-François—director of operations and projects at the DisAbled Women’s Network of Canada in Montreal.

“A lot of racialized women who have disabilities don’t have access to diagnosis, which can sometimes help to move forward, to get on a housing list,” she adds.

With the cost of living rising nationally, wages stagnating and work growing increasingly precarious for low-income communities, and now with the devastating impacts of COVID-19 and the resulting evictions crisis, these problems are only getting worse.

In 2020, Statistics Canada released information on the availability of barrier-free publicly-owned housing across the country. Barrier-free is defined by Statistics Canada as meaning “a building and its facilities can be approached, entered and used by persons with physical or sensory disabilities”—it’s one definition on a spectrum of accessibility terms ranging from “visitability,” which offers basic access features, to “universal design,” which is supposed to be accessible to everyone, and which shouldn’t require modification in order to be barrier-free. It’s important to note, however, that while universal design caters to the largest range of needs, it’s not a guaranteed solution because of people’s unique circumstances.

Statistics Canada’s data—only available for a few provinces—seems to suggest that some provinces had seen
a decrease in publicly-owned barrier-free housing between 2016 and 2018, the last year for which data is available.

But one analyst working on the dataset, Lee-Anne Jennings, explains that because the definition of accessibility can be vague, it leaves the national infrastructure survey open to interpretation from year to year.

“Analyzing the data, we did notice that this definition [of barrier-free] can be possibly interpreted in different ways by different respondents, as evidenced by the change in response,” Jennings says. “One possible issue might be someone considering [that] the whole building must be barrier-free, as opposed to some units.”

Alongside differing response rates, this accounts for the changes in accessibility rates between the two years.

In Ontario, for instance, the response rate for semi-detached houses and 5+ storey buildings rose between 2016 and 2018, which revealed clearer information: the percentage of publicly-owned, barrier-free housing in these categories was lower than initially thought. Only 1.2 percent of semi-detached homes and 17.7 percent of 5+ storey buildings publicly owned in Ontario are barrier-free.

In contrast, the response rate in New Brunswick fell from 100 percent in 2016 to 0 percent in 2018.
Jennings notes that a more specific definition would be useful in future surveys. But it’s clear that there is yet to be a unified national understanding of what accessibility is—and therefore no way to uniformly implement it.

Standards for accessibility across the country vary on municipal, provincial and national levels, and within different human rights frameworks. For instance, a 2012 review of the National Building Code found national guidelines to be out of date compared to provincial and international standards, which led to significant revisions in the 2015 Code; but regulations like the mandatory minimum number of accessible units in new developments varies by province, for instance, five percent in B.C. or 15 percent in Ontario.

Neither of these minimums are enough to meet the needs of Canada’s growing elderly population, advocates have pointed out. A report by the Rick Hansen Foundation estimates that the proportion of Canadians with disabilities will rise at nearly double the overall population growth rate over the next decade.

New developments are some of the best environments to build in adaptable and accessible features, because older housing stock often can’t be easily adapted. But with provinces already failing to house those with access needs, these minimal rates for new housing developments indicate a failure to preempt what Canada will need in a decade’s time.

“You’re going to grandfather certain things in,” said David Kron, executive director of the Cerebral Palsy Association of Manitoba. “But when you’re building [new developments], just put that spin on it: how do I make this a truly universal design for everybody? So that the next generation has those options on where to live comfortably?”

Despite the gaps in access, public social housing regulations are stronger and more accessible than private housing across the country. Every social housing corporation that responded noted that they have funds available should a tenant need to retrofit their unit to be more accessible—within certain limitations dictated by the home’s design. On occasion, municipalities will also introduce bylaws improving upon provincial housing guidelines.

For newer projects and renovations, the National Housing Strategy put forth by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) stipulates that 20 percent of new affordable housing units developed by the government’s housing development fund need to be barrier-free and use universal design principles. The accompanying National Housing Strategy Act, put in place in 2019 to hold the government accountable to the goals outlined in the Strategy, is the closest thing to nationwide implementation of accessible social housing guidelines, though the medium- and longer-term impacts are yet to be seen.

The CMHC noted in its guidelines that projects that go above minimum requirements will be prioritized in funding decisions, but the question still lingers as to why universal design isn’t implemented more thoroughly in new developments, with higher mandatory minimum requirements.

“Building a suite with universal design in mind doesn’t make it not attractive for somebody who doesn’t have a disability,” Kron points out. “It just means that everybody can use it.”

The cost of implementing universal design, while not insignificant, is lower than one might imagine. A 2015 study by the CMHC found that accommodating accessibility features in new developments raised the required area of the property by less than 10 percent, and expenses by six to 12 percent. But, even if the costs were higher, Kron notes,

“Good design is good design, right?”

“I use the analogy of back in the ’70s, when seatbelts were [made] mandatory,” he says, pointing out that people were skeptical of the cost and necessity of seatbelt implementation at the time. “Now, it’s a culture that everybody puts on their seatbelt. You don’t even think about it.”

Considering the myriad legislation at various levels of government, it’s clear there are efforts being made
to address the accessible housing crisis. But stories like Kerr’s are far too common. On the other side of the country, Lori Pederson’s experiences are strikingly similar—she’s faced these problems for the last 25 years.

Pederson, who contracted juvenile-onset Rheumatoid Arthritis as a child and has required 25 orthopedic surgeries over the course of her life, has been off and on B.C.’s social housing waitlists since the 1990s. Her income and employment status changed over the years: she spent a decade living in accessible co-op housing, and then for 15 years was able to live in her own apartment. In 2015, Pederson had to move back into inaccessible rental accommodations following income changes and lay-offs, and the struggle to find adequate housing began again—and despite being unable to afford accessible housing in Burnaby, she was told consistently that her income, which was below $40,000, was too high for housing support. Only in March of this year was she able to find subsidized, accessible accommodations, after a 2019 increase in maximum income level for people eligible for public housing in B.C., which is now capped at $50,000.
Pederson feels the parameters of who is eligible for housing support don’t match the lived realities of people with disabilities who have low or middle incomes, especially in cities like Vancouver or Toronto.

“Try and find a market-based apartment for under the price of $2,000 that’s accessible. That when you go in the front door, you can actually get in with your wheelchair. I’ve never been able to,” she says.

When the co-op housing sector was hit by funding cuts in the 1990s, Pederson knew that things were going to get worse. “It was commented on that this would ruin life for people of low income and disability […] and indeed, that’s exactly what happened.”

Austerity policies over the last two decades have shaped this crisis: overall, there’s been a drop in social housing provision since 1990, and when paired with cuts to other social supports over time, more and more people with disabilities have been put in precarious housing situations.

Until the layers of this crisis are addressed—unaffordable housing, inaccessibility, inadequate development standards and the lack of a national understanding of barrier-free infrastructure—people like Kerr, Pederson, and thousands of others will continue to live in limbo, with inaccessible temporary accommodations, and in anticipation of moving up the social housing waitlist. But they shouldn’t have to choose between housing and their work, families, or support systems—not when there’s so much that can be done closer to home.

PHOTOS COURTESY BLOOD TIES FOUR DIRECTIONS CENTRE

A 240-square-foot house may not seem like an ideal living situation, but for some people who are unhoused, tiny homes can be a creative solution tackling a small part of the issue.

According to a 2018 Canadian government report, approximately 35,000 Canadians experience some form of homelessness on any given night, and the Territories face unique challenges including extremely high building costs and a shortage of vacant housing. Blood Ties Four Directions Centre, a non-profit organization offering HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C support in Whitehorse, Yukon, started one tiny home in 2012 when funding for housing was a pervasive issue amongst their clients, as well as discrimination and inadequate/insufficient housing types.

“It’s really hard to help a person get on Hepatitis C treatment and care when they don’t know where they’re going to sleep that night,” says Patricia Bacon, former executive director for Blood Ties. Bacon thought, why not start small? “We wanted to be able to do something within the scope of our agency,” she says.

From 2012 to 2016, the one, 240-square-foot tiny home served as transitional housing for five clients. Then it moved into storage while Blood Ties searched for a permanent lot. After securing funding and getting a zoning change, they were finally able to build four more homes creating the Steve Cardiff Tiny Home Community. (Steve Cardiff was a Yukon Territory MLA and supporter of Blood Ties who died in a car crash in 2011.)

Since opening in January of 2019, 10 people have lived in the homes—two people have stayed since 2019, says Brontë Renwick-Shields, executive director for Blood Ties. One client, who struggled with chronic homelessness for many years, found stability in a tiny home, says Bacon.

“That is a hugely successful outcome.”

But the homes aren’t for everyone—some people have challenges with collecting excessive belongings, something which can offer a sense of security, and others need 24/7 support, says Bacon. The homes are not suited to those with limited mobility either. The Steve Cardiff homes have sleeping lofts accessed by stairs, making it difficult for those with mobility issues.

“The tiny houses definitely work for folks, but we also need to have mixed models because one style of housing doesn’t work for everybody,” says Renwick-Shields.

But the idea has caught on. Tiny home communities now house veterans in Calgary’s Homes for Heroes development and people in Carcross/Tagish First Nation, Yukon.

For Blood Ties, the project is a success—even if it is only a small one. “I think we have had a lot of clients that have appreciated having their own little house to call home,” says Renwick-Shields.

“File:New Brunswick Legislative Building- Fredericton- New Brunswick-20170718.jpg” by Mhsheikholeslami is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

In 2021, New Brunswick remains the only province in Canada that refuses to fund out-of-hospital abortions. Currently, only three hospitals in the province can perform abortions—one in Bathurst and two in Moncton. While the province is finally being taken to court by a civil liberties association for this lack of funding support, which violates the 1984 Canada Health Act, we look back at the over 200
years of restrictions to abortion access in New Brunswick.

1810

Before Canada is even officially declared a country, the government of New Brunswick
enacts the first abortion restriction law in what would later become Canada.

The government amended the British Malicious Shooting or Stabbing Act, making it illegal to willfully administer any substance that would cause the “miscarriage” of any “woman then being quick with child.”(Quickening referred to the perception of fetal movement, something that typically occurs during
the fourth month of gestation.)

1969

The federal government amends the Criminal Code to allow doctors to perform abortions in hospitals, only if the pregnant person’s life or health is threatened by the pregnancy.

1984

The Canada Health Act is instituted, mandating that health care within Canada is to be publicly administered, comprehensive, universal, portable, and accessible. However, because the delivery of health care is under provincial jurisdiction, the federally mandated health policy ran up against provincial conflicts of interest in New Brunswick and beyond.

1985

Dr. Henry Morgentaler, a Canadian doctor renowned for his efforts to perform and legalize abortion across the country, requests to set up an abortion clinic within New Brunswick. The provincial government, in response, amends the Medical Services Payment Act and creates Bill 92, which allows the government to charge physicians who are found performing abortions outside of a hospital approved by the Minister of Health with professional misconduct.

1988

In the case of R v. Morgentaler, the Supreme Court of Canada rules that Canada’s current laws around abortion are unconstitutional. The court states that the law violates Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by infringing upon a person’s right to “life, liberty and security of person.”

1989

Morgentaler legally challenges the New Brunswick government’s abortion policies for the first time, arguing he should be reimbursed under New Brunswick’s Medicare for three abortions performed on New Brunswick women at his clinic in Quebec because the provincial laws stated nothing about outside-of-province provisions of abortions. The courts side with Morgentaler, prompting the provincial government to tighten their policies further.

The provincial government amends the Medical Services Payment Act once again with Regulation 84-20, requiring any person seeking a funded abortion to have “two medical practitioners certify in writing that the abortion was medically required.” The abortion can also only be performed by a gynecologist at one of the few hospitals in New Brunswick which are approved to offer the procedure.

1994

Morgentaler opens an illegal abortion clinic in Fredericton, prompting the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New Brunswick to revoke his licence. However, the Court of Queen’s Bench of New Brunswick deems Bill 92 unconstitutional in September of 1994, allowing the Fredericton clinic to remain open
and legal.

2002

Morgentaler launches a lawsuit against the New Brunswick provincial government for refusing to fund abortions at his clinic. In response, the provincial government argues that abortions are accessible at the time, with two hospitals offering it, even though Morgentaler was providing over half of all legal abortions
in New Brunswick.

2003–2013

The government continues to stall the lawsuit throughout this decade, using various delay tactics, such as arguing that a woman would be better suited to bring the case to court in 2007, until Morgentaler’s death in 2013.

2014

After Morgentaler dies in 2013, the manager of his Fredericton clinic announces that they’ll be dropping Morgentaler’s over-10-year battle with the government due to a lack of funds to keep up with legal fees. The clinic closes in July, after losing too much money to keep up with costs.

2015

Clinic 554, a new abortion clinic, opens in the same space as Morgentaler’s clinic, once again becoming the only private abortion clinic in New Brunswick. The clinic offers other publicly funded health services, such as contraception and emergency IUDs, along with performing abortions not covered by Medicare, the name for New Brunswick’s provincially administered healthcare plan.

The new Liberal government in power in New Brunswick amends Regulation 84-20 to remove the need for people seeking abortions to receive written approval from two separate doctors.

2020

After Clinic 554 announces the impending closure of the clinic that September, citing financial unsustainability, protesters gather to fight for the clinic and for provincial funding of abortions. A statement from Dr. Adrian Edgar, the medical director of the clinic, notes that the fact that Medicare does not fund abortions performed in private clinics means that Clinic 554 has to either ask the patient to cover the abortion fees or he, the nurses, and “allied providers” have to cover them instead. Fees usually range between $750 and $800.

2021

In response to the closure of Clinic 554, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association files a lawsuit in January challenging the New Brunswick government’s refusal to fund abortions done in private clinics. The lawsuit asks the court to strike down part of Regulation 84-20, which states that non-hospital abortions cannot be funded by Medicare.

The federal government reduces the Canada Health Transfer in February—a transfer payment from the federal government to provinces and territories based on adherence to the Canada Health Act—to New Brunswick by $140,000. The government is withholding the payment due to the province’s refusal to fund out-of-hospital abortions.

Illustration by Janie Hao

“So, where is your apartment around?” she asked me.

Even before answering, I know where this is going. She isn’t asking because of romantic interest, the subtle hint of inviting herself over. Perhaps she wants to size me up, or maybe it’s just one of those gold-standard small talk questions someone asks, similar to “what do you do?” Either way, I don’t have the answer she wants to hear. “Uhhh…. Bathurst and St. Clair,”

I cautiously respond, avoiding the fine print: that I am 33 years old, do not have an apartment, and live with my parents. I am also quite happy to.

There is a common assumption that children should move out of their parents’ home at a certain age, and failure to do so is greeted with suspicion of the family, or even judgment of one’s financial situation. (What age that is, is anybody’s guess, but anecdotally, somewhere around 25 years old.)

Historically, I have used an impressive amount of mental gymnastics to avoid the question of where I live. When cornered, and the reality of my family living arrangements are unveiled, I have what feels like a list of a politician’s talking points ready—that I am close with my parents; that we have a beautiful, spacious home in midtown Toronto, equipped with a sprawling backyard in a walkable neighbourhood; that our house is a salon for intellectual discussion, debate and humour; that I save money on Toronto’s monstrous rent, and that I maintain a sense of independence—all of which is true. If I look at my potential date and fail to notice any visible signs of persuasion, a quiet “oh” or a small nod or smile, I try to soften them by mentioning that I am “helping take care of my newborn nephew”—greatly exaggerated—a painkiller for my hard-edged, opinionated disposition.

Yet for all the motivational self-talk and reasonable arguments, the stigma prevails. Hollywood star Michael B. Jordan was shamed online for admitting that at age 32, he lived with his parents. “You get home-cooked meals,” he said, and cited his love and admiration for his parents. Even then, he was defensive about his choices, saying he planned to move out as soon as he could. (In 2020 it was reported that Jordan has since moved out of his parents’ home.)

When Toronto Life shared a 30-year-old Chinese-Canadian’s story of living at home with his parents on social media, there was a barrage of negative comments. “Independence man!” one person wrote, with another adding, “what a joke. It seems like a lot of people with high income are mooching off their parents.” One person responded, “some of you aren’t immigrants and have no understanding of cultures outside of North America and it really shows,” while another commentator added, “I knew a lot of people who COULD have lived at home and saved, but they chose to move out.” Reading through the commentators’ names, one could see a difference in cultural perspectives.

That said, the pandemic and public awareness of diversity have encouraged an openness to new perspectives, with an eye on the bank balance. Job loss, financial reasons, loneliness, or the need for daycare, have led 1.5 million Canadians—and six percent of adult children in Ontario—to move back home. This “boomerang generation” (young adults who have previously left their parents’ home, only to return) is an increasing trend in Canada and the U.S., bolstered by multiple economic crises in the past few decades, a weak labour market, and student debt. “It is definitely not where I thought I’d be at this stage in my life,” 24-year-old Elsa Anschuetz told American news website Axios in an interview, but it “is definitely better than living in an apartment alone during this crazy pandemic.”

For many ethnic Canadians—including within my own Indian heritage—it is unusual, even abnormal, to move out before marriage. While financial status tends to be a chief motivator for adult children to remain at home, the number of adults living with their parents doubled between 1995 and 2017, according to Statistics Canada in 2017, 21 percent of South Asians and 19 percent of Chinese Canadians aged 25 to 64 lived at home, compared with nine percent of the total Canadian population aged 25 to 64. These groups may have cultures which value intergenerational living arrangements.

Seven years ago, my sense of individualism was publicly questioned. Appearing on The Agenda with Steve Paikin, a public affairs show on TVO where I spoke about the millennial generation and the labour market, I mentioned that at 26 years old, I lived at home with my parents. “It wasn’t your first choice or wasn’t the most fabulous thing or you certainly hope to be on your own one day,” the host asked me, to which I responded that “a staple of the immigrant mentality is if you don’t need to spend the money, why spend it? If I don’t need to spend the money to, if I can afford to, live at my parents in downtown Toronto, why would I live somewhere else? To prove to them I am independent?”

Yet it is precisely that last idea—independence—that is being called into question. When a relative’s husband asked my mother why her children still lived at home—didn’t she want to teach her kids independence?—she retorted that there were many ways to teach them independence.

This disconnect is a byproduct of cultural psychology, with many eastern cultures valuing a collectivist mindset, social cohesion, interdependence, and deference to elders. Krystal Ng, a 30-year-old recruitment manager in Toronto, values both family connections and a sense of financial independence. She told me that while she moved out at the age of 25, “primarily for investment reasons,” she visits her Chinese-Canadian family three times a week in Richmond Hill.

Prior to the pandemic, her colleagues asked what she was doing on the weekends, and she left them baffled when she responded that she was hanging out with her parents. “They did not understand why I would do that on a weekend. Was I doing something with them? No, just running errands and being with them.” A frequent traveller with her parents and brother, she told me that when she was 23 years old, one couple could not believe she was “still at home.”

I began to think about the intersection of culture and household structures in 2013, when I read a Toronto Star report about Punjabi-Canadians disagreeing with a townhouse developer in Brampton, Ontario, leading to a war of words between two city councillors and a resident meeting with about 500 attendees. The issue wasn’t about pricing, but architecture. “Townhomes is not our concept of buying property,” said Paramjit Singh Birdi to the Toronto Star. “Every house here has two or three families. The Punjabi community lives in joint families and no joint family can fit in a townhouse.”

Despite the suburban desire for a single-family home with a white picket fence and 2.3 children, much of the world—from Africa to the Arab Gulf, and especially in South Asia—live in joint families, which extends beyond the nuclear family “and it typically grows when children of one sex do not leave their parents’ home at marriage but bring their spouses to live with them,” notes the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I saw this phenomenon close-up, when shortly after meeting my aforementioned GPS-inquisitive date, I moved to Mumbai for work. My newly married-friend, an Ivy League-educated family business owner, who lives with his wife, parents and grandmother, told me that it was important to him to be close to his grandparents. He also noted the ease of lifestyle in coalescing resources together—maids, drivers, and cooks.

From 2001 to 2011, joint families in urban India grew by 29 percent with even the vice president of India advocating for them in a national newspaper. “Indian joint families are considered to be strong, stable, close, resilient and enduring with focus on family integrity, family loyalty, and family unity at expense of individuality, freedom of choice, privacy and personal space,” write psychiatrists Rakesh K. Chadda and Koushik Sinha Deb in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry.

Bollywood films have featured joint families, and superstar Amitabh Bachchan found his joint family “most enjoyable” and “entertaining,” with the patriarch living with his wife, his son Abhishek and daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, a former Miss World winner. When Oprah Winfrey asked in a 2009 interview how Abhishek lives with his family, he turned the question around asking if Oprah lives with her family, “How does that work?” to which the audience roared. “We’re a different culture where we are trying to get the parents outside of the house,” Oprah added. “In many parts of the world … that is not normal. It’s normal to bring the parents in, to have respect for the elders.”

It’s easy to consider joint families as relics of a different world and adverse to Canadian values of individualism and self-reliance. But even the pandemic’s economic instability has not changed Canadians opinions of inclusiveness, with our country amongst the highest in the world in valuing immigrants. If we are to go beyond a superficial dance-dress-and-dining multiculturalism, we’ll realize that, according to Statistics Canada, as of 2016 six percent of Canadians live in a multigenerational household (of at least three generations), and it is one the fastest-growing demographics. Urban policy writer Diana Lind wrote in the Globe and Mail: “We have codified and glorified the stand-alone home with a white picket fence. We have praised the price appreciation that comes with home ownership, ignoring the increasing percentage of non-homeowners who bear the brunt of rising property values. We have endorsed the aspirations of privacy, space and exclusivity without a strong countervailing public discussion about the downsides of this lifestyle: increased carbon emissions owing to greater dependence on cars; loneliness and obesity owing to less social interaction and fewer walkable neighbourhoods; and class and racial segregation.”

She adds that we have innovated in all forms of life, from ride-hailing apps to the gig economy, but our view of housing “feels stuck in that postwar period.” Just as the pandemic has made us rethink ideas like working from home, visiting overlooked parks, and even the purpose of shopping, surely we can reconsider alternative arrangements?

“My family friend lives in a gorgeous and leafy neighbourhood in Johannesburg, and the parents along with six friends bought a piece of land in the city, and developed six beautiful houses with lots of light and a shared garden and pool,” a former colleague told me. He informed me that they’re “not hippies,” but are affluent economists and architects, adept at living on their own. “It’s a modern kibbutz,” he said, referring to the traditional Israeli collective community based on agriculture. Far from the hippie branding, wohngemeinschaft (or communal living) is common in Berlin, even making way for more upscale cohousing projects, in which an architect facilitates discussions between developers and residents.

After four years of living alone in Mumbai, I recently moved back to my parents’ home in Toronto. Tolerating differences was always going to be an adjustment, but I began to see my parents differently. Long-term care had been frequently in the news for COVID-19 outbreaks, but I pondered how so many children could leave their parents in their wisest years to slowly fade away?

Not every family has the capacity to live together, but many of our modern urban crises—loneliness, burdensome financial obligations—including exorbitant rent—ageism, childcare, and even interpersonal intolerance and imprudence—could be alleviated through different ways of living. It has taken us a pandemic to rethink; what will it take for us to take action?

Art by Valerie Thai

When recent university graduate Michelle Martins returned to her hometown of Kitimat, a town in northern B.C. with a population reported to be about 9,000 people, she didn’t plan to stay for long.

“I came back to Kitimat. I gave myself a year. And I feel like Kitimat is kind of like the Bermuda Triangle of the north … you just get sucked in.” Almost exactly 10 years ago, in March 2011, she saw an ad in the local paper for a child and youth counselling position with non-profit Tamitik Status of Women. By June, she was hired, and she hasn’t looked back since.

A lot has changed over the past decade. Martins is now executive director of Tamitik, a role she took over in August 2020. The organization itself has expanded, too. Over 40 years ago, it began as a group of women sitting around a table, plotting the path to gender equity in their community; now they operate nine intersecting services, including a sexual assault response team, counselling services, a homelessness prevention program, and multiple shelters. Next year they plan to open the first 24-hour daycare in the province.

The pandemic has brought renewed focus to the issue of intimate partner violence as reports that both its frequency and severity had spiked came out in May 2020, increases that have continued into 2021. With that came a commitment of $100 million in emergency federal funding to support domestic violence survivors and their children, much of it to add spaces in transition shelters (meant for stays of up to a month) and second-stage shelters (meant for stays from six months to two years, depending on the shelter).

But according to experts, advocates, and women on the front lines of the problem, more second-stage shelter beds in some ways are only a stop-gap solution to the wider cycle of abuse at play: that of a growing affordability issue that is affecting domestic violence in Canada. Without permanent housing options, temporary solutions are forced to fill the widening gap.

In many ways, B.C. is leading the charge in providing supports for women leaving violent situations. The province actually hosted the first second-stage shelter in the country, when support workers in 1970s Vancouver identified the need for a housing solution that offered a length of stay and emotional and financial support beyond the more traditional short-term women’s shelter. These shelters are life-saving for the women who use them.

“It really is that time and space that gives survivors the chance to get back on their feet,” explains Krys Maki, who published a national study on second-stage shelters in September 2020. “Because of the support that’s given at second-stage [housing] during that time, where they can heal, they can connect, they can build community, they can set themselves up for success.”

Those shelters are in dire need of more funding, per Maki’s research—not just to stay afloat, but to provide crucial counselling and housing support programming, while they often have to fundraise simply to pay employee salaries.

Though Tamitik continues to be on a trajectory of consistent growth, it can often feel like they are constantly playing catch-up, never truly getting ahead of the problem of violence against women (VAW), Martins explains. During the first few months of 2020 they were only able to move two women out of second-stage housing, but every one of their half-dozen tenants is ready to move to long-term housing.

“I don’t think it’s a lack of life skills that is keeping them in second stage right now,” Martins says. “But rather, it is the lack of affordable housing in the private market.”

Of course, this isn’t a local problem: across the country, transition and second-stage shelters are not intended as lengthy stopovers, and yet women leaving violence are living for years in conditions meant for temporary use, simply because they have no other place to go. According to Statistics Canada data from 2019, 77 percent of violence against women shelters in Canada reported that the top challenge facing residents was “a lack of affordable and appropriate long-term housing options upon departure.”

Kitimat is emblematic of the crisis playing out in communities across B.C. The site of massive infrastructure projects (most recently the $17-billion LNG Canada plant), each production boom has brought more prosperity in some respects, but not everyone benefits in the same ways. It has raised the cost of living in the area and, reportedly, the rate of violence. The influx of mostly male LNG workers—at the peak of the project, almost 7,000 of them—has raised concerns from community members about harassment from strangers. What we know for sure is that when a woman wants to leave her abusive partner, she can no longer afford to, a goal that might have once been within her reach.

In a community with a five-digit population, 100 women and four children were turned away in 2020 alone, according to data from Tamitik’s transition house, Dunmore Place.

The vast inequality at play is creating a large fissure, and women are falling into it. Those who are disabled, racialized, low-income or otherwise marginalized are not only more likely to need to access the second-stage shelter system, but more likely to face homelessness to boot.

The massive discrepancies in Kitimat—and resulting power differentials—caused by social and economic inequality are felt most acutely by the Haisla Nation, the First Nations band whose traditional territory includes the area in and around Kitimat.

Martins says that typically Tamitik’s clients are 70 to 80 percent Indigenous women. This is a stat mirrored nationally: according to an extensive literary review by researcher and homelessness expert Kaitlin Schwan, aptly titled “The State of Women’s Housing Need and Homelessness in Canada,” Indigenous women are overrepresented in domestic violence shelters by five times their representation in the Canadian population.

These issues likely feel all too familiar to residents of famously expensive Vancouver, just over a 1,400 kilometre drive south from Kitimat. Tanyss Knowles, project manager with the BC Society of Transition Houses, is one of those residents, and has been pushing the province to take the issue seriously for a while. These days she is focused on the Getting Home Project, a three-year, community-based partnership with BC Housing that focuses on reducing barriers to safe, secure, and affordable housing for women experiencing violence.

“The provincial government that we’ve been working with has been very responsive to our organizations, to what we have had to say about this issue. And BC Housing in particular has, I think, taken a real leadership role in terms of across Canada, what’s happening around these issues,” she says.

The past few years have accelerated action on the issue: the province now has a Priority Placement Program to help women leaving violent situations find housing quickly with BC Housing’s directly-managed units. In 2018, B.C. also announced the Women’s Transition Housing Fund, which is going to build 1,500 spaces over 10 years for women leaving violence at a cost of $734 million. But it has taken work from grassroots activists and organizers such as Knowles to keep things moving.

Angela Marie MacDougall, who has been executive director of Battered Women’s Support Services (BWSS) for almost 20 years, is another one of those people. We can’t let the positivity of new investment overshadow the work that needs to be done, she says, especially in “recognizing that real estate is a way to generate wealth, and private and corporate ownership of land and real estate is at the heart of why we continue to struggle to see investment in local housing, in large part because there’s no money in it.”

The cost of not taking domestic violence and the resulting housing issues seriously is stark. “One of the leading causes of women’s homelessness is domestic violence or intimate partner violence. So, that is a clean, clear indicator of how housing-precarious folks living with their abusers are,” explains Maki.

The topic of women’s homelessness is under-researched and misunderstood. Schwan’s literary review found that “homelessness is uniquely dangerous for women and gender diverse peoples. When we fail to prevent or end housing need or homelessness for women, we ensure repeated cycles of violence and housing precarity.” As co-chair of the Women’s National Housing and Homelessness Network, Schwan has years of insight into the issue.

As outlined in Schwan’s report, women are systematically undercounted when researchers use “snapshot” methods, which typically measure street-based homelessness and homeless shelter usage, both of which tend to be male-dominated. Instead, women will choose options they view as safer than a shelter system that may retraumatize them, like sleeping on friends’ couches.

Even if affordable housing was readily available, not everyone has the same experience trying to secure it. Landlords discriminate against women on financial assistance, single mothers, racialized women, and disabled women.

The particular difficulties Indigenous women have trying to secure housing are well-documented. Martins explains that, recently, a homelessness prevention worker at Tamitik tried to help an Indigenous woman with a monthly income of $4,000 secure an apartment. The pair viewed 12 different options with no success. But soon after, the employee was able to get a white woman with a $2,000 monthly income into one of the same apartments the Indigenous woman was turned away from.

Schwan’s research confirms that this wasn’t an isolated incident. “Indigenous women, girls, and gender diverse peoples experience the most egregious housing conditions throughout Canada and remain the most underserved in both the VAW and homelessness sectors,” creating the condition of “inter-generational homelessness.”

At the national level, Maki sees a lot of potential in two developing plans to help address these issues, if done properly. One is the National Action Plan on Gender-Based Violence; the other is the National Housing Strategy, a 10-year, $70+ billion plan announced in November 2017.

They recommend the government appoint a gender-based violence liaison within the National Housing Strategy to coordinate with shelters from coast to coast. “We’re breaking down those divides between these sectors, and we’re bringing everyone together, so that everyone’s on the same page and knows what’s happening. We can all work better together that way.”

There’s a lot of promise in how years of work and millions of dollars in funding could change the experience of women leaving violent situations. But for many on the front lines of this crisis today, they need real solutions, in real time.

“Even though these buildings are being funded, and they’re currently under construction, and there are lots of housing affordability projects going on, we also need to have solutions for women right now. Because it takes time to develop bricks and mortar,” Knowles says.

Martins knows that all too well. Tamitik’s upcoming housing development, which is being funded through BC Housing’s Building BC: Women’s Transition Housing Fund to the tune of over $10 million, will boast 18 transition housing beds, 10 second-stage housing units and 20 units of affordable housing, and act as a hub for Tamitik’s programming. The project has been in progress since 2016, but Martins’ predecessor, Linda Slanina, actually had the dream of a mixed-use housing project 25 years ago.

Knowles feels positive about the progress made in the province, and praises B.C. for continuing to work to make the issue a priority. But she urges other areas of Canada to think about this issue sooner rather than later.

“It’s unfortunate that we live in a province with such a housing crisis that makes it hard to feel like we’re getting ahead of it.… I would say to provinces that don’t have as long a history of housing unaffordability: you have an opportunity to get ahead of the curve.”