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In 2021, the Kensington Market Community Land Trust (KMCLT) did an astonishing thing. After a protracted renoviction battle over the Toronto neighbourhood’s iconic Mona Lisa building, the KMCLT bought it from the would-be evictors. The rumoured plan to turn it into a cannabis hotel was foiled and the tenants of the 12 residential and five commercial units—including our beloved corner store, barbershop, and hat store—got to stay.

As KMCLT’s co-chair, I helped organize the community around the tenants, and it was satisfying to see the building go into communal hands. For months I’d walk past Kensington Avenue’s vintage shops and fruit stand with a feeling of elation. We bought the building!

KMCLT’s bold move is part of a burgeoning movement of community land trusts (CLTs) across Canada. CLTs are community-led organizations who remove land from the speculative real estate market and keep it affordable forever. They revive the idea of the commons and collective stewardship, and help governments fulfill their responsibility to house their citizens. They’re quickly emerging as one of the only reliable workarounds for people to find affordable housing—and to keep their neighbourhoods alive.

Like most CLT purchases, KMCLT, which is made up of tenants, neighbourhood residents, and other supporters, bought our building with a mix of government funding and a regular mortgage. The mortgage is taken out by the land trust, which uses the rents to pay it off. It’s the government funding that allows us to keep those rents affordable. As we pay off the mortgage, rents can even go down.

Despite attempts at a second acquisition, KMCLT still owns only one building. But the plan is to use equity to purchase other buildings, as fast as we can. The urgency reflects the housing emergency in Canada: for every new unit of affordable housing built, we lose 11. Those lost affordable homes put people on the street.

Still, from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust (DTES CLT), co-led by Indigenous and Japanese Canadian organizations, to Black-led CLTs in Nova Scotia, people are coming together to find solutions to the housing crisis. They are now bolstered by the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts, established in 2017. The group has over 40 member CLTs and four staff to support CLT development across Canada. “Urban, suburban, and rural communities reach out to the network regularly for guidance on developing a land trust,” director Nat Pace says.

The first meeting of Canadian CLTs on Canadian soil took place in Montreal in 2018, at a conference organized by the Milton Parc Citizens’ Committee. We toured Milton Parc and heard about the decades-long battle between the community and developers that led to the entire neighbourhood being cooperatively owned under the umbrella of a CLT. The key moment of that conference, however, was when we were challenged by an Indigenous activist to put land back at the core of the movement.

Collective stewardship requires releasing the death-grip private property has on our imaginations. Thinking about land, settlers must necessarily grapple with the fact that it’s stolen. If at that meeting in Montreal we were mainly white settlers talking about CLTs, that is no longer the case. In Northeastern Ontario, the Temiskaming District Community Land Trust is creating an Indigenous women-led CLT to provide Indigenous-designed affordable housing, while in Toronto and B.C., Indigenous land trusts are also taking shape.

The modern CLT movement began with New Communities Inc., an agricultural community formed in Albany, Georgia in 1969 by civil rights activists who believed that secure land tenure was key to Black liberation. Tapping into this idea, African Nova Scotian CLTs, such as Upper Hammonds Plains just outside Halifax and Down the Marsh in Truro, have formed to secure historic land claims. In Vancouver, Hogan’s Alley land trust honours the legacy of Strathcona’s Black community, displaced through racist city planning.

CLTs can encompass so many forms of land use. Cultural land trusts in Toronto and Vancouver have formed to preserve space for artists; The Northern Community Land Trust is creating affordable home ownership in Whitehorse; and, also in Toronto, the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (PNLT)—the first of the resurgence of CLTs in Canada, having started in 2012—is saving rooming houses from renoviction. PNLT’s first acquisition in 2017 was the Milky Way Garden, which is stewarded by Tibetan refugees.

I’m inspired by the opportunity to rethink not only our relationship to land, but also the extractive capitalism that mines bonds between people. There’s a deep camaraderie between Canadian CLTs, which come out of neighbourhood battles against gentrification, displacement, and erasure of working-class immigrant communities. We learn about community—both its challenges and opportunities—and in turn we create a community for ourselves.

Governments are starting to listen: the recent federal announcement of a $1.5 billion Rental Protection Fund, designed for the acquisition of at-risk residential buildings, is a recognition that we can’t build our way out of the housing crisis, and that non-market housing is essential to keep housing affordable.

It remains to be seen how the Canadian movement will sustain itself over the long term. For now, CLTs offer communities a rare source of optimism in the ever-deepening housing crisis. It’s exciting to be part of it, and to know that anyone who wants to effect change in our relationship to land and community can be part of it, too.

In the summer of 2023, 200 African asylum seekers were left homeless in Toronto. With nowhere to go, they had no choice but to sleep on the streets after escaping poverty, political violence and climate disaster back home.

While municipal, provincial and federal governments twiddled their thumbs, Black and African organizations in the city rallied together to provide shelter, food and assistance to the group of Black migrants. One of the leading organizations behind the effort was the Rwandan Canadian Healing Centre (RCHC), a Toronto-based group that provides support to Rwandans and others facing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) caused by violence and war. Forwarding a mission of hope, the RCHC gathered collaborators and accomplished what the three levels of government could not: they found local shelter spaces for the migrants.

Canada has a 156-year history of welcoming migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. Today, the country is more diverse than it has been in over a century. In 2021, according to Statistics Canada, more than 8.3 million people, or 23 percent of the population, were, or had ever been, a landed immigrant or permanent resident in the country. This marked the largest proportion since Confederation, beating the previous 1921 record of 22.3 percent and making it the highest number among the G7. People from all over the world have left violent situations to build a new home in the Great White North. This is the story of the Rwandan community as well.

The 1994 Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi is one of the worst atrocities in modern human history. In the span of 100 days of chaos, close to one million Rwandans were slaughtered by their fellow citizens largely due to their ethnicity. Millions of Rwandans, mainly from the Tutsi heritage, fled the landlocked nation to escape the carnage.

By 2016, Toronto was home to over 1,000 Rwandans. Today, most of the city’s Rwandan population is made up of older Rwandans who came as refugees post-genocide, and a younger generation too young to remember the horrors, but who still live with the scars of that time and long for the promise of a prosperous future. Part of that prosperous future means bringing the Rwandan community together to collectively heal from the trauma of war.

*

Kizito Musabimana escaped the 1994 Rwandan genocide as a child and came to Canada as an immigrant after spending years in Kenya. When he got to Toronto, he didn’t expect to spend time unhoused, but that’s part of his story. Now, he’s the founder and executive director of the RCHC. Since adopting Canada as his home, Musabimana has been a leader in the city, heralding the effort to find suitable shelter space for the African migrants over the summer. Facing his own history of PTSD, Musabimana knows how powerful community is, and how important physical spaces like homes, community centres, and third spaces are to mental health.

With the help of other East African organizations, the RCHC wants to create a purpose-built neighbourhood for Toronto residents in the Rwandan community and other groups dealing with trauma. The organization is also working with the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Canada’s national housing agency, inside their National Housing Strategy Solutions Labs, a project aimed at finding community-driven solutions to the affordable housing crisis. The labs offer local and national organizations funding and expertise to help them solve complex housing problems. One successful project that started within the labs is the Gender Transformative Housing Supporting Women Leaving Violent Relationships: Co-creating Safe-at-Home Hamilton. Another, in association with the Canada Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Research Network (CanFASD) and the Alberta Clinical and Community-Based Evaluation Research Team (ACCERT), aims to create a framework to house youth with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Through the Solutions Lab, the CMHC provides groups like CanFASD or the RCHC with up to $250,000 through a competitive application process to develop a community-centred plan to solve housing issues as they relate to specific populations. “As a newcomer in Canada who has experienced homelessness,” Musabimana says, “I would have greatly benefitted from an affordable housing project like this, which focuses on community and connection that offers resources to navigate a new country.”

Together with the CMHC, the collective of African communities created the African Canadian Affordable Housing Solution/Model. The model is a framework that details all of the important elements necessary for their vision of a purpose-built neighbourhood. To determine what’s needed, Rwandan and East African communities participated in several interviews, surveys, and workshops to flesh out what an urban village should provide. The design of the AfriCanadian model hinges on three interwoven perspectives: intergenerationality, cooperativism and holisticism.

More than most, African families live together in one place. Grandparents, parents and adult children often cohabitate together as a way to keep familial bonds strong. Building housing with room for multiple generations of residents under one roof is a key element of the plan. The model also hopes to set up cooperative networks of self-governance, so community members have direct decision-making power in how their neighbourhood runs. Most importantly, it offers a holistic approach to mental health. With proper access to public space, recreation and onsite counselling, Musabimana wants the project to centre healing. “We want to recreate the support and community of a traditional African village for African Canadians living in Canada who haven’t been able to experience it. To bring a taste of home to the community,” Musabimana said at the onset of the project.

As of November 2023, the group has already created the framework thanks to community engagement. So what’s next? “Once we are able to identify land, then we will have everything we need to begin the development phase,” Musabimana says. But that is not so easy. The path to housing development, and to carving out space in Toronto, is filled with trouble.

*

Back home in Rwanda, the government, led by Paul Kagame, has been attempting to restore a country that almost destroyed itself. In 2005, the Rwandan government began creating the legal framework necessary to allow agricultural cooperatives that included housing to flourish within the nation’s market economy. Not only smart economic planning, cooperatives were also meant to build reconciliation among a population scarred by trauma. According to International Labour Organization documents, cooperatives in the post-genocide period flourished as many felt the need for protection and safety within the social grouping that they provided.

Here in Canada, the Rwandan diaspora does not have the resources to build the sort of communal neighbourhoods that provide safety, healing and community. A small but growing population in Canada, Rwandese families face the same housing issues other Toronto residents do, but without a historic legacy of property ownership. Although statistics on the rate of homeownership for Rwandan Canadians are scarce, the Black homeownership rate is only 45 percent, while it is 66.5 percent for the general Canadian populace. The reasons stretch from anti-Black racism to housing policy, but it also has lots to do with the generational effect. Generational Canadians have had the time to create communities when housing prices were lower, and because of that many have managed to hold onto legacy housing. The Rwandan community, and many other Black communities (though not all) have relatively recent histories in Canada and have become victims of the jump in housing prices over the last two decades.

In contrast, communities with a longer history in places like Toronto have managed to carve out areas of the city to protect their land rights. One great example is Toronto’s main Chinatown, which has avoided the worst of gentrification through collective organizations like the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust (TCLT).

The TCLT is a community-controlled effort to build an inclusive, culturally competent, and ever-evolving Chinatown in Toronto. Launched in 2023, the land trust is designed to protect the historic Chinatown community from condo developments. They acquire, develop and steward land, in perpetuity, for community needs and benefit. The organization was established by managing director Chiyi Tam, but is governed democratically by its members. An urban planning expert, Tam leveraged her experience with land trusts in both Parkdale and Kensington Market and decided to work with her community to save it from the host of developers buying properties along the Spadina Avenue neighbourhood.

Comparatively late to the game, the Rwandan and East African communities are now trying to get onto that property ladder. They’re searching for a sense of home, support, and for some, a sense of safety for the first time.

*

A filmmaker by training, Musabimana is a bit out of his depth when talking about housing and development, but the African housing project is filled with experts who believe in his vision. A partner with the RCHC, Jonathan Okubay is the executive director of New Nakfa, a nonprofit organization that caters to Eritrean Canadian youth. He has a background in housing development and has become an instrumental part of moving from the CMHC’s solutions lab, which led to the model, into the development phase.

One of the major hurdles now, Okubay says, is getting the city on board to help drive down the price of construction. He says the project will cost anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000 up front. “We’re moving into actual implementation and looking at sites for potential development, and at how we get the CMHC and the feds and the city involved in making the project feasible,” Okubay says. Part of that feasibility has to do with finding a place to build in an already crowded market. “Ideally, we would like to have it in a central location with access to transit nodes, schools and grocery stores,” he says. “Despite the difficulty…due to high land prices, in an ideal world, we would like it to be in Toronto.”

Canadian real estate is some of the most expensive in the world, and the costs are only growing. They’re wildly inaccessible in Toronto, where the price of materials and labour has grown to be one of the highest in Canada. The average low estimate for constructing the hard costs (labour, materials and equipment) of multifamily homes was $250 per square foot. In Calgary, the average low estimate was $190. Currently, Toronto’s hard cost estimates are roughly keeping pace with smaller cities like Phoenix and Denver, which sit at around $180 (U.S.)—or about $244.

Where Toronto exceeds most other cities in cost is at the government level. Fees and levies to build are astronomical in the city. A 2018 real estate study by Altus Group found that fees levied by the government added around $165,000 per unit for high-rise condos and $206,000 for single-family housing. Once the price of land, developer profits and government fees are taken into account, Toronto becomes almost inhospitable to any sort of affordable housing. This means finding a good developer is part of the myriad of hurdles for the community in general.

Musabimana, Okubay and their team have been stuck dealing with government bodies and talking to stakeholders, all the while holding the community close. It has been a process, but one guided by purpose. “I would say we are mainly searching for a land and development feasibility study, then the next phase is fundraising,” said Musabimana.

With all of these challenges, it would be easy for many to get discouraged. Still, a few years ago, no one would have thought this tiny little segment of the city would be part of such a radical vision. Musabimana is positive that the RCHC’s model, co-created with the community, will become a reality. Based on Okubay’s development experience, he believes they could start building the project by spring 2025.

If everything goes to plan, Toronto could soon have an African village in the middle of its urban jungle.

Illustration by Erin McCluskey

On a rainy Thursday in April, I arrive at a yellow brick, split-level house in London, Ont. People are doing word searches at a large dining table. Some help themselves to a container of freshly baked peanut butter cookies, and CBC News is playing on a television in the living room. This house, tucked away in a quiet, tree-lined neighbourhood a few kilometres from London’s gritty city centre, feels almost like a family home. “You’ve come right in time for morning break,” says Sarah Dutsch, the homeowner, as I take off my shoes. This is one of Ontario’s Homes for Special Care: a controversial custodial housing program for people living with severe psychiatric challenges. Sarah and dozens of other Homes for Special Care operators are now in talks with the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care about the future of mental health housing in Ontario.

At first I am surprised by the peaceful, if static energy at Sarah’s place this morning. In the weeks leading up to the visit, mental health experts expressed to me major concerns about Homes for Special Care. They are government-funded, for-profit operations, born in the 1960s as a place to live for those discharged from psychiatric hospitals. Today, they are criticized for offering outdated and misguided support to vulnerable people. Sarah and her staff spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week caring for eight tenants living with mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and bipolar disorder.

She bought the Home for Special Care and renamed it the Dutsch Residence six and a half years ago, leaving behind a travel and tourism career in British Columbia because she wanted to do something “more meaningful” with her life.

In her kitchen she points to a row of colour-coded cups, one for each tenant, on a windowsill. There is also a code of ethics on the fridge, sign-up sheets for activities, and a list of tenants’ initials on the wall so Sarah can keep track of who is around for mealtimes. Residents can take out money from their monthly allowance from the Ministry of Health and LongTerm Care three days a week; Sarah goes to the bank to do the withdrawals. With the help of staff members, she cooks three meals a day (plus snacks), cleans, does laundry, shops, and supplies personal items like soap, shampoo, and diapers.

Outsiders may criticize the Homes for Special Care program, but it doesn’t change Sarah’s perspective on them. “We can’t lose the reason why these homes exist in the first place: to provide a safe, directed program, based on the needs of the tenant,” she says. “Sometimes the supports need to be pretty active, and that’s okay.”

Research, however, shows that the unconditional and mandatory support in place in Homes for Special Care operations could be hindering some residents from building the skills they need to reintegrate into the world around them. The program “meets almost no best practice criteria, and this has been known for 35 years, at least,” says John Trainor, former director of the Community Support and Research Unit at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). At one time Trainor was in charge of inspecting some Homes for Special Care operations in Toronto, and for decades he tried to close the program down. “It’s a scandal, really,” he says. “It shouldn’t be there. It’s worse than many models in countries with fewer resources.” In the 1990s, Trainor says he was pulled into a meeting with senior Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care officials who told him that the program was, in fact, slated for closure. But those plans never went through. “We never got called back to another meeting,” he says.

Founded at the start of de-institutionalization, in 1964, and despite the Ministry’s apparent efforts to shut the program down, Homes for Special Care endures. Now, the program that houses some of the province’s most mentally ill citizens is slated for modernization, to be completed by 2020. Homes for Special Care operators and the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care agree that the program needs to change, but the two sides are at odds about what, exactly, to improve. Talks are stop-and-go. Outside experts, including Trainor, question if the 50-year-old custodial housing program should exist at all.

***

In Sarah’s dining room she begins to introduce me to some of her tenants—eight people who are part of a group of hundreds in Ontario whose lives and homes are at the centre of this debate. A woman named Carol (whose name has been changed to protect her identity) with grey hair and a stable, intense gaze appears from the kitchen. As I turn around to greet her, she immediately asks to speak with me in private. Sarah grows tense as Carol leads me into the living room.

We sit side-by-side on a couch. Carol wears a pink, flowery shirt and though she has asked to talk in private, she speaks loudly enough that Sarah can hear her from the adjoining dining room. “I don’t like the atmosphere here, it has a very negative impact on me,” says Carol. Years ago, Carol lived in a supportive housing apartment for individuals with disabilities with her boyfriend, James. After more than one fire started in the apartment and bed bugs were found, Carol and James were evicted, and Carol found herself living in Sarah’s residence. Her niece now picks her up and drives her for weekly visits to see James who, following the eviction, was placed in a tightly controlled long-term care home. “It was hard for me to adjust, because of not having the nurturing relationship [with him],” says Carol. She says she wants to live independently again, to be with James; she feels restless and isolated. I ask what she likes to do for fun. “I go to the variety store quite a lot,” she says. Sometimes, she stays in her bedroom. “I have my TV in there and I like the solitude.”

As Carol and I talk I can feel Sarah’s presence in the next room. She sighs audibly and then appears in the doorway: “Should we set a time limit on this?” This was not how she expected the visit to start, she admits. Later, she tells me Carol has “stuff on the go” almost every day—community programs three days a week and visits with her niece and James on Tuesdays. Still, Carol maintains that she wants more. “I call Carol my Eeyore, lovingly, because everything is always dark even though she has the most supports,” says Sarah.

In a series of meetings conducted by the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care for the modernization of the Homes for Special Care program, many residents echo Carol’s sentiment: They want more independence. The Ministry did not agree to multiple requests for interviews, and they would not provide me with the raw data from the survey they conducted, or the interview notes.

But other research shows similar findings. In a 2017 meta analysis of housing choice for people with mental disorders, published in the journal Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, researchers’ pooled analysis showed that 84 percent of study subjects preferred to live in their own apartment, with family, or with people with whom they’ve had a choice in selecting.

However, Homes for Special Care operators argue that some tenants would struggle to live without the constant and custodial support that they provide. “I invite [critics] to come for a weekend. Because this type of program, as much as they disagree with it, it works,” says Lisa Zavitz, an energetic, self-effacing woman who runs another eight-bedroom home down the street from Sarah. For some, she says, “if someone is not there cooking them a meal, they don’t eat. If I don’t remind them to put on deodorant and change their underwear, some of them won’t. This is the reason we’re here.” Jim Akey, who owns one home in St. Marys, Ont., and another in St. Thomas, Ont., had similar concerns about independent living: “Some people might function fine with it, but I think they would be the exception, rather than the rule.”

When I posed this idea to Geoffrey Nelson, a psychology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University whose research focuses on community mental health programs, including Homes for Special Care, he disagreed. “That’s the kind of mindset that makes people stay where they’re at,” he says. “Some operators don’t believe that people have the potential for recovery, but we know from research that a substantial number of people with mental illness do get better.” Nelson conducted a study of mental health housing in London, Ont., in 2003 for the Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health. The study found that while 79.3 percent of subjects said they preferred independent living, 76 percent were not living in independent housing. Also, with the exception of only two people in the study, subjects who said they preferred to live in Homes for Special Care were already living in one. “When you start saying people can’t survive outside these walls, you might get a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Nelson says.

John Sylvestre, vice-dean of research at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Social Sciences, is the co-editor of a textbook on mental health housing. When I called him at his office on campus, he agreed. “If people want to try, let them try. Who am I to say that a fellow citizen has gone far enough?”

At the Dutsch Residence, Sarah and Carol lead me to the basement to see Carol’s bedroom. Full of books, photographs, and art, Carol’s room is small and lived in, and she appears proud of it. She is one tenant in the house with her own bedroom. In two other bedrooms, Sarah has created privacy barriers using various objects. For one tenant, a sizeable sheet of plywood from Home Depot and a dark wood dresser that’s taller than his bed separates him from his two roommates. “In a perfect world would he benefit from a single room? Probably,” Sarah says. In another room, she’s separated two beds using a room divider from Jysk, an affordable furniture store.

“We still see that people are sharing rooms with unrelated adults,” says Sylvestre. “They don’t get to choose who [their roommates] are. That’s not accepted in any other part of the specialized housing system. We’re in 2018 and to still see a form of housing that isn’t in its basic form or shape changed since the [1970s], I find it disappointing.” Some homeowners, including Sarah, say some tenants like sharing rooms. Plus, at the current level of funding, she says the only way she can operate this business is by housing eight tenants in a four-bedroom house. Long-term care homes in Ontario, and prisons and hospitals across Canada all get more per diem funding than Homes for Special Care. To keep a resident in hospital costs the province between $700 to $1,400 per day, according to the 2018-19 Ontario hospitals’ interprovincial per diem rates for inpatient services. In Homes for Special Care, a resident costs the province $51 per day.

In Sarah’s kitchen, jazz plays on the radio as Sarah puts together chicken salad sandwiches with the help of one of her tenants. “At first I was worried about you talking to Carol,” she confesses. “But really, she’s the perfect one for you to talk to. She indicates what the struggle is. Somewhere in her mind, she wants more independence, but in the day-to-day realities of how her life trajectory has gone…”

She trails off, but doesn’t need to finish. The mental illnesses that tenants in Homes for Special Care deal with are not minor by any measure. Operators regularly struggle with where to draw the line when it comes to providing support for their tenants—when to let them live their own lives and make their own choices, and when to intervene because those choices are against the best interests and sometimes safety of the tenant.

Every month, tenants get about $140 from the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care for personal spending. According to homeowners, many spend the allowance immediately. “It’s gone within 24 hours,” says Lisa Zavitz. Often, she says, she finds tenants lying on the sidewalk near their home, having defecated in the street after trips to Valu-mart on payday. “They eat so much their bodies can’t break it down.” Increased appetite is a common side effect of medication for schizophrenia, and “the medication pushes their addiction button.” She says one of her tenants drinks oil. “Within human rights, I can’t physically stop them from that, so I clean up the messes, I make sure they get bathed, I make sure the whole place has been bleached, and then I sit down and have the same conversation with them: ‘I’m here if you need help budgeting money. You can’t do this, this is bad for your system.’”

The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care plans to increase tenants’ spending allowance to $500 per month, a move that every operator I spoke with opposes. Sarah put her stance on it simply: “Sometimes, them not having money can be one of their only controls.”

***

The homeowners and operators I spoke with are open, even enthusiastic, about giving more individualized care and independence to tenants, but they say they need more funding to do so safely and effectively. Many of the homes are now closing down—smaller ones have become too expensive to run, owners say.

“We’re not like small businesses, we can’t just increase our costs,” says Connie Evans, an owner and president of the Ontario Homes for Special Needs Association. “Empower the homeowner” is a maxim used by several Homes for Special Care operators who say they need more money from the province to survive. “The small homeowners have been struggling, they are not making any money,” says Rahim Charania, another operator.

Policy experts argue that the for-profit model of Homes for Special Care is one of its most fundamental flaws. “It provides an incentive for people making money to keep a stable pool in their house and to have attitudes to say that they can’t do any better,” says Nelson.

Sarah’s Home for Special Care is perhaps one of the best in the business, and not all homes are run like hers. “The one-on-one care, the home-like setting, making sure that they matter and are part of the family. We’re a family, and we’ll argue and bicker and everyone is entitled to that,” says Lisa, who guesses that 50 percent of homes could use significant improvements.

***

On a warm day in May I pull up to a building tucked away on a side street in downtown Toronto. This residence, which opened in 1994, is inconspicuously large with high ceilings and 20 private bedrooms each equipped with an ensuite four-piece bathroom. “This is the Cadillac of mental health housing,” says Janet Huang, the executive director of the non-profit housing program Pilot Place Society, who welcomes me at the door.

With just slightly more staffing than Homes for Special Care, this non-profit is known as one of the best ways to house people with mental illness. “Homes for Special Care went out of fashion, although they were the answer to a lot of things,” Janet says.

The program should not be abolished entirely, Janet says. “There are people who could do well there,” though, she says, it certainly shouldn’t be the only option.

At Pilot Place Society’s three Ontario residences, the philosophy is recovery. “We are re-training people for community living,” Janet explains. They’re taught the basics, like how to bathe and pick out an outfit. Some tenants are employed by alternative businesses as mail couriers and others as helpers in a cafe in the city. There is a Tenant Council run and led by the residents.

Even in this type of housing, where increased independence is an explicit, mandated goal, getting people to recover is difficult. Janet and her staff took at least a year to successfully train residents to go to the corner store next door unsupervised. One Pilot Place Society resident named Ivan showed up in 2009 from CAMH’s inpatient unit, where he says employees told him he could not cross the street because he’d previously been hit by a car. At Pilot Place Society, Janet pairs Ivan up with other residents to go on walks around the neighbourhood. “Here, we’re part of a society,” Ivan says, adding that he’s much happier than his days in the hospital. “I have freedom here.”

Perhaps Carol, the woman in Sarah’s house with the stable, intense gaze, would fare better living somewhere like Pilot Place Society. Or perhaps Sarah and the Homes for Special Care program are offering Carol just what she needs for her specific challenges and abilities.

Carol’s niece, one of her only surviving family members, is happy with the care her aunt gets at the Dutsch Residence. “Sarah has a routine, a grasp on these guys. Carol doesn’t seem happy there, but it’s a wonderful place,” she says. Is the embattled custodial housing program fundamentally and philosophically flawed, or is it in need of a serious fix? Sarah doesn’t know what, exactly, the Ministry’s modernization and the plans to change the program will ultimately mean for tenants.

“We’re all kind of scratching our heads going, are they losing something, or are they gaining something? I’m just anxious about caring for these people.”

A rendering of the proposed shelter. Photo courtesy of the Salvation Army.

The Salvation Army is proposing an 892-square-metre “mega-shelter” in Ottawa’s Vanier neighbourhood that would provide temporary shelter beds for up to 350 people. The shelter would be the biggest in North America, featuring a special health care unit, a space for addictions recovery, permanent housing referrals, a dining facility, counselling, employment skills training, and more. The Salvation Army says the plan is an innovative and ambitious way to provide a safe space for Ottawa’s homeless. But housing advocates are skeptical.

THE LOGISTICS
It’ll cost the taxpayers of Ottawa $50 million and the city will have to rezone the property in question before any construction can begin. Currently, the space is zoned for residential and “traditional mainstreet”—a pedestrian-friendly strip of shops, restaurants, and services. But the Salvation Army is seeking an exemption, arguing that the shelter is only a small element of the facility.

THE STATE OF HOMELESSNESS IN OTTAWA
An estimated 7,200 people in Ottawa are homeless and/or living in shelters. Several of the city’s shelters are located in the Byward Market, a popular tourist destination.

THE CITY’S PLANS
The key component of Ottawa’s 10-year housing and homelessness plan, launched in 2014, is to use a housing-first approach to manage homelessness. According to the city’s website, “providing a person who is homeless with housing and the necessary supports to stay housed leads to a better quality of life and is far less costly than staying at an emergency shelter.” By 2024, the city plans to eliminate chronic homelessness and minimize emergency shelter stays to less than 30 days.

A “TREATMENT-FIRST” APPROACH
The Salvation Army’s proposed shelter ignores the city’s anti-poverty strategy. “What it communicates to me is [the Salvation Army] is still anchored in a treatment-first approach,” says Tim Aubry, a housing and homelessness researcher from Ottawa.

Research shows housing-first is twice as effective as treatment-first at helping people get out of homelessness. And with housing-first, “not surprisingly,” says Aubry, “individuals show improvement in functioning and quality of life associated with their exits from homelessness.”

A BAND-AID SOLUTION
San Diego tried a similar approach where charitable organizations ran large emergency shelters, and found it didn’t work. “We saw a nearly 19-percent increase of unsheltered homeless in the county,” wrote Michael McConnell for the San Diego City Beat. “It’s clear this model that focuses funding on the front-end, clogging our system with temporary shelters, has failed to resolve homelessness in our city.”

With evidence and political rhetoric backing housing-first, Aubry is perplexed as to why the city is potentially investing in more shelter beds. “If somebody’s homeless,” he says, “why wouldn’t you start with giving them a home?”

The night bus to Toronto’s North York General Hospital was nearly empty at two o’clock in the morning in September 2014, and Dan McLaughlin was nervous. He was on his way to receive an MRI so that doctors could diagnose a painful back injury, the result of years of hard labour, previous drug abuse, and sleeping on the streets. Procedures like this often happen before sunrise, and although the hour was early McLaughlin was relieved to finally be receiving medical attention for an ailment that was causing him increasing discomfort. The injury had gotten so bad that he was spending most of his time in bed.

“I could barely stand, barely walk,” he remembers. He spent one week using his computer chair to wheel himself around his rental house in Toronto’s east end so that he could do basic things like use the bathroom.

When McLaughlin arrived at the hospital he approached the receptionist in the waiting area, and she asked for his Ontario health card. McLaughlin had anticipated this, of course, and he knew his only option was to lie. He told the woman that he’d left his health card at home. “I need to do stuff like that to get by,” he explained.

In reality McLaughlin did not have a health card at all. He didn’t own a single valid piece of government identification.

For 15 years, McLaughlin had been trying tirelessly to prove to the Canadian government that he exists. He’d taken trips to Service Canada and ServiceOntario offices to get a social insurance document, a health card, a citizenship certificate. Even though he once owned those pieces of ID, nobody would give him any replacements. Each one of the receptionists, clerks, and officers McLaughlin spoke to told him he needed to show supplementary identification—a birth certificate, a social insurance card, a driver’s licence, a passport—before they could issue him new ID.

He went to his old elementary school to try to search for copies of his birth certificate, but the school no longer kept those records. He found two separate lawyers who agreed to advise him pro-bono on how to get identification, but neither of them were able to solve the problem. “The only thing they could get me were copies [of my documents], and copies aren’t good in Canada,” he says. One time, McLaughlin walked into police headquarters in downtown Toronto, where he knew his information was on file because he had a criminal record, and asked the officers to fingerprint him, take his photograph, and vouch for him as a Canadian citizen. “I’m in your system. You know who I am,” he pleaded. None of these tactics worked.

McLaughlin was stuck. He was living as a pseudo-citizen, a Canadian with no proof that he is one. He could not access welfare or health care without identification and most employers would not accept his social insurance number, or SIN, which he knew by heart, without the hard copy. He toyed with the idea of travelling to Scotland, his birthplace, to find a copy of his birth certificate—that is, until he realized he would be unable to leave Canada because he could not get a passport without identification.

His back problems were growing worse, and he was tired of relying on odd jobs for cash in lieu of a SIN card and a payroll position. He needed a piece of identification badly.

“Short of chaining myself to an embassy, I don’t know what else to do,” he says.

According to statistics from three Canadian advocacy projects—the Housing Help Centre, Partners for Access and Identification (PAID), and Street Health—McLaughlin is one of thousands of Canadians who are living without at least one piece of official identification. As a result, many live on the fringes, without access to doctors, employment, welfare, or other social security nets.

One woman is 84 years old and has not been able to get ID for more than 20 years. Another is pregnant and cannot access health care in Ontario because she does not have a provincial health card. In some cases parents do not register their children’s births in the first place, which makes identification especially difficult to obtain later in life.

Beyond the everyday frustrations that come from lacking the mobility, security, and autonomy that other Canadians enjoy, to live without any identification, any proof of belonging somewhere, is a form of citizenship that is unique in its invisibility. Not having ID can mean not feeling welcome in a place that is meant to be your own. “I’m a man without a country,” McLaughlin often mused.

Without the ID to get a job, travel, or get health care, McLaughlin felt trapped. “I can’t do any of the things most Canadians can do,” he said. “I want more out of life than this.”

***

McLaughlin is jovial, bearded, and missing the middle finger on his right hand from his days working as a handyman. Now 52, he has spent time as a landscaper, a carpenter, a plumber, and a mechanic. He came to Canada with his family when he was an infant; it quickly became his home.

McLaughlin’s youth was full of freedom and mischief. When he was 15 years old he travelled from Windsor to Detroit with a girl he loved using only his library card, which he says the border guard accepted as valid proof of identification.

In his early 20s, while hitchhiking northbound on the American west coast, a man offered him a drive and a job setting up fencing on a horse ranch in Oregon. It was there that he spent his days saddling up and riding horses along the perimeter of the property’s 4,000 acres, lying down and adjusting barbed wire as he rode the expansive boundaries of the ranch. After tiring from a full day’s work, he would tie up his horse to one of the fence posts and doze off on the grass underneath the bright stars of the Oregonian countryside until the sun came to wake him up in the morning.

But as he got older, McLaughlin found himself in some legal trouble. He keeps a nine-page list in his bedroom of his criminal convictions—including auto theft, robberies, and break-and-enters—that date back to the 1980s and finish in 2011.

He was first arrested when he was 16 years old, when he was managing the pinball machines at an arcade store in Richmond Hill, Ont. His family life was dysfunctional, and he was itching for change. His girlfriend at the time was from British Columbia, and she wanted to go back out west, so that is where the couple decided they would flee.

But first, the pair needed money to make the trip. McLaughlin broke into his family’s house in Toronto and stole a large aquarium that had a Plexiglas slot on top, which his parents put money into to save up for trips. He filled a pillowcase with cash, and on his way out the door he took his mother’s jewelry, including his grandma’s wedding ring, which had been given to his mom when she married his father. Altogether, McLaughlin and his girlfriend stole about $600, enough for three bus tickets to B.C.—one for him, one for his girlfriend, and one for her brother.

Shortly after McLaughlin arrived in B.C. he learned that his parents had a warrant issued for his arrest. A neighbour saw him and his girlfriend leaving the house with the loot. “The whole thing lasted about a week,” McLaughlin remembers. He returned to Ontario, turned himself in, and got probation.

Years after the robbery, in 1999 an explosion next door caused the family home to burn down. The only items saved from the flames were photo albums that had been wedged so tightly into bookshelves that the fire had no oxygen to destroy them. Original versions of McLaughlin’s birth certificate, citizenship card, and landing papers, which today would help him prove his identity, were incinerated.

After that, in a separate incident, McLaughlin’s wallet—which contained his driver’s licence, a photocopy of his birth certificate, and his health card— was stolen.

Even though McLaughlin filed taxes each year to the Canadian government and was audited by the Canada Revenue Agency last year, he had no luck getting any ID back.

“If you lose your driver’s licence, you still have a whole wallet full of ID. You can go into [the Ministry of Transportation] and say ‘I’ve got this this, this, and this,’” McLaughlin says. “But if you don’t have those starting pieces, you’re fucked. You’re me. You’re trapped in a country.”

Today, McLaughlin says he’s cleaned up his act, but he’s still stuck without ID. “They sent me to prison to reform, and to become a productive member of society, but I can’t do that without ID,” he says. “The only thing to my name is my criminal history.”

***

McLaughlin’s motivation to find identification came in months-long cycles, beginning with hope and ending in despondence. A fresh lead or a conversation with a friend would inspire him to find a way to get a health card or a citizenship card but inevitably, each time he tried, McLaughlin would hit a dead end, grow exasperated with the recurring rejection, and give up for months at a time—that is, until another friend, or another lead, picked up his hopes once again.

Many people in McLaughlin’s situation are even less lucky than he is. While little data on the matter is available, anecdotal evidence from social and ID workers suggests the issue is widespread. One ID clinic worker says he knows of at least 20 cases of people living in downtown Toronto who have no identification in their possession.

Many do not have the support systems or resources that McLaughlin enjoys, like a house that is rented to him by a local shelter for 30 percent of his monthly income, or a resumé with names on it like Ford and Texaco Express Lube and Car Wash, or a robust circle of friends and acquaintances. “I’m lucky that I have enough skills that I’ll be able to carry on and survive, but for someone who is not as confident as me, someone else could just get run right over,” McLaughlin says. “They’d be a nameless face.”

Without ID, McLaughlin got by with connections and luck. A friend of his, who is a nurse, was able to vouch for him so that he could access a doctor when his back acted up.

He often relied on his checkered past, too. He memorized his criminal barcode—491512B—the number that came up on the dashboard computer in police cars when cops stopped him and punched his information into their system—and recited much to the surprise of police officers, when they asked him to produce identification.

“How do you know your number?” they would ask.

“I’m just a barcode,” he responded.

By late 2015, McLaughlin had been living without formal ID for more than a decade—and that seemed unlikely to change any time soon.

***

The atmosphere in the dining area of a community centre on Toronto’s Queen Street East was chaotic late last December: music played from a small radio in the corner, while patrons sat at tables talking. Others appeared to be intoxicated, pacing around the room. Most were experiencing homelessness and using the day shelter as a refuge from the wintery outdoors.

Inside a small office sat Gaétan Héroux, a polite man with grey hair and a suitcase full of envelopes. By 1 p.m. he had already checked 17 people off on his list of appointments, and more still were trickling in to seek his help. This is one of his busiest stops on his daily route through Toronto.

As one of the city’s few identification workers, Héroux travels the city solving people’s identification-related problems—although he would tell you that ID is not the problem; rather, it’s the symptom. “The real problem,” he says, “is housing.”

Most people facing significant ID-related issues are homeless, or at least precariously housed, he says. In fact, when McLaughlin first lost his identification 16 years ago he was living on the streets too—he had been robbed of his wallet, which contained multiple ID cards, while he was taking a shower in a Toronto homeless shelter.

Many in Canada’s homeless population may have trouble holding onto their identification because they do not have a safe place to put their ID. To combat this, some homeless shelters and advocacy projects installed “ID safes”— cubbies or drawers for people to store their ID until they need it again. One man, for example, who deals with mental health challenges and lives on the street, visited Héroux’s office to replace a health card that he lost just one day after he took it out of an ID safe.

Even for low-income individuals who do have housing, renewing lost identification can be difficult and costly. Depending on the province, some identification cards can cost up to $75, while a five-year passport will cost upwards of $120.

“If you have the necessary financial means, it’s not really an issue,” says Mary Ann Proulx, who helped develop an ID clinic in York Region, Ont., to assist people living without identification.

One of Proulx’s toughest cases was a three-year-old girl whose birth was never registered by her parents. The girl’s mother later passed away, and her father had been in a severe accident when her stepmother approached Proulx for help.

“It was unclear whether the dad was going to live,” she said. The stepmother needed to get the girl’s birth registered so that the family could access tax credits and benefits that would help them during the crisis.

After weeks tracking down and getting a hold of the appropriate documents, Proulx went to the hospital where the girl’s father was staying so he could sign her birth certificate.

But that’s a best-case scenario for those in this predicament. “There were some cases where I could not get ID for them at all,” Proulx says.

Meanwhile, in December 2016, Proulx’s clinic closed its doors when York Region chose not to renew its annual funding.

The government, it seems, can do little to help. In an email statement, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, the government body that replaces citizenship cards in Canada, wrote: “If an individual would like to replace their citizenship certificate, they must fill out the application form and provide necessary documentation to prove their identity. If their previous card or certificate was lost, stolen or destroyed, the applicant must provide details such as when, where and how this occurred.” (The department declined a phone interview for further questioning.)

In the United States, the situation is not much different. On a cold Philadelphia morning last November, 74-yearold Chip Delany found himself standing in a line of about 50 people waiting to sort out identification-related issues— similar to the ones McLaughlin faces here in Canada.

“It’s blowy, and my nose is running,” Delany said on the phone as he waited outside the ID office. He was hoping to get identification for his partner, Dennis Rickett, who had been without it for 27 years. Rickett himself had grown so frustrated searching for proof of his own citizenship that he left the task entirely to Delany, who worried that, if he were ever to die, he would be leaving his partner to fend for himself without identification, and without a way to provide himself with shelter, care, or basic income.

“You can’t do anything, you can’t have a bank account or insurance if you don’t have ID,” Delany says. “I’m dealing with this practically every day and it’s very depressing. Nothing seems to work,” he says.

“The whole thing is just a nightmare of a catch-22.”

***

On November 9, 2015, McLaughlin waited in a crowded room at a ServiceOntario office in Toronto’s east end, holding a signed letter vouching for him from the ID clinic and the certified copy of his landed immigrant document—a piece of identification a parole officer was able to dig up for him years ago upon his release from prison, but that proved to be useless before.

“I really don’t think this is going to work,” McLaughlin says, beginning to feel hopeless. “Maybe we should just get out of here.”

His friend, who drove him to the offices in a Zipcar, urged him to stay, and then McLaughlin’s number was called.

McLaughlin walked up to the counter to begin to plead his case. He knew this part well: He would go up, tell them that he does not have supporting documents other than a copy of his landed immigrant document, try to negotiate, and then the person behind the counter would deny him.

“I’m not sure you’re going to be able to help me,” he told them, already growing weary.

The man behind the counter looked at McLaughlin, looked at the small piece of paper, furrowed his brow, and began punching information into his computer.

Then, moments later, much to McLaughlin’s surprise, he walked out with a health card. It was a specific date, inked in fine print on the copy of his landed immigrant document, that did the trick, falling within a range that was deemed acceptable to prove identity.

“Often it just depends on the bureaucrat you get,” explains Héroux. “This is the world of ID. You’ve got to negotiate.”

McLaughlin was thrilled, phoning and texting friends, and setting up appointments to get his back checked out by a medical professional. This small piece of recognition of his existence gave him not only access to health care but also, perhaps just as importantly, validation that he belongs here. In our current system, a piece of paper can dictate how we feel about our place in society.

McLaughlin was able to get his back pain diagnosed—a herniated disc—and is now deciding on treatment options. An Ontario health card is just a small step on McLaughlin’s journey. He learned quickly that it could not act as supporting ID for a social insurance card and he still needs a steady job, so the journey is not yet over.

“It’s just a start,” he said. “If I hadn’t gotten that health card that day, I would have given up.”

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

It’s time to re-envision housing in Canada. Many of our challenges can be solved through innovation: we must not look to old models to solve our current problems. After all, it’s our current model that’s leading to mass homelessness.

No civilized group of people should allow that to happen to their neighbours, and we shouldn’t tolerate inaction. Let’s make our number one priority to help every homeless person in Canada. Some will need mental health support, some will need an economic solution, others will be suffering from addiction or abuse. Housing should be a right in Canada, like health care or education. It’s ridiculous that we will pay tens of thousands of dollars in hospital costs for a homeless person, over and over again, but do not help them pay their rent and end that cycle.

Secondly, let’s acknowledge there’s a growing population whose housing needs are not being served by the private sector, non-profits or government. Sadly, among this group are average working-class families, particularly young families, but it also includes immigrant and refugee families, students, First Nations, and single mothers. The cost of land in urban areas has made home ownership unattainable for many and increased the pool of renters. Worse yet, because there have been few incentives to build rental housing, low vacancy rates mean renting has become expensive, inadequate, or unavailable. Non-profit affordable housing or public housing should assist those who have fallen through the cracks. Yet, the abandonment of government funding for housing creates wait lists so long they defy credulity—too many end up homeless.

The confluence of these events has meant that much of the new private supply generated in both ownership and rental has been in high-end studio and one-bedroom suites. With their high costs and small size, these options aren’t suitable for many of the population types mentioned above. As we embark upon a new national housing strategy, an expanded non-profit housing sector could be the answer to many of these challenges. By removing the profit motive, the cost of developing housing is instantly cheaper, and by placing the burden of developing this housing into community groups there is an incentive to respond to the needs of families and others unserved by the market. In addition, unlike government-run housing, nonprofits have less bureaucracy, decisions are less political, and they have the ability to raise money from donations and volunteers. Expanding this model to serve average families, immigrants, and students instead of just vulnerable populations could be the key to ensuring that we have diverse, affordable, community-connected housing in the long-term.

Innovation will also mean looking to the sharing economy and assessing whether more communal living options could become mainstream. While shared gyms, pools, and laundry have been commonplace for years, we must now explore the limits of what level of sharing is marketable and attainable. Would tenants and owners be willing to accept quality over quantity by sharing their kitchens, living rooms, and more? Perhaps everything other than bedrooms should be reconsidered and we should look to new design options to maximize the utility of those spaces. Many of these things happen organically in repurposed homes or for roommates, but it’s time to re-examine it through a design and zoning lens in purpose-built rentals or condos.

Innovation in housing has to mean more than renting out your spare room or adding a Murphy bed. The next era is ripe for ideas on finance, design, and management. However, it’s going to take cooperation from all levels of government and a willingness to uncouple ourselves from some centuries of nostalgia about what a house looks like, what ownership looks like, and what our basic rights and entitlements are. If so, we may find a new era of opportunity, innovation, and our most important new social program.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

If you’re a This Magazine reader, you almost surely have an opinion about gentrification—that either it’s good or bad. Otherwise known as neighbourhood renewal, gentrification has come to dominate the discourse around modern urban development. And no wonder. When coupled with the hockey stick-shaped inflation in the housing market, gentrification has made urban living increasingly less affordable for those who don’t command six-figure salaries. These are the same people who do all the essential work that allows cities to function: teachers, nurses, personal support workers, public servants.

The issue I want to raise is how municipalities can become more proactive about the ripple effects of this rapidly accelerating process. Namely, I want to ask: Why should municipal officials go out of their way—as often seems to be the case—to improve neighbourhoods experiencing gentrification? Why don’t they instead pursue a form of negative planning—becoming incrementally less responsive to homeowner concerns, or promoting development projects that conflict with the quality of life in up-and-coming neighbourhoods? Why don’t local governments deliberately seek to make these areas less desirable as an antidote to run-away real estate prices?

Stay with me here. As someone who has been writing about municipal affairs for more than 20 years, I’m keenly aware my foregoing questions are more rhetorical thought experiment than workable policy proposal. But I still think it’s worth pulling this thread if only to explore how the cycles of gentrification, real estate speculation, and municipal re-investment reinforce and amplify one another—thus accelerating the interlinked affordability and housing crises that afflict big cities. The privileging of gentrification is baked into certain types of municipal policies—for example, the cash-for-density-bonus mechanisms, such as Ontario’s Section 37/45 rules. Under them, municipalities allow developers to add density in exchange for money invested in local improvements—new or improved parks, art spaces, public art, daycare spaces, etc. (Other jurisdictions have similar versions of these policies.)

The ostensible justification is that such funds are invested in public amenities that become necessary due to the incremental population growth that comes with increased density. The reality, however, is quite different.

In Toronto, for example, hundreds of millions of dollars in Section 37/45 funds, paid by high-rise condo developers, land in neighbourhoods experiencing intensification. But intensification is often a manifestation of desirability: developers build in sought-after areas that are already seeing an influx of capital and discretionary spending. The residents of these same neighbourhoods then receive additional benefits, in the form of new amenities, which, in turn, make their homes even more desirable, thus attracting other developers. In short, the financial benefits from these developer contributions accrues—in the form of higher property values—to the residents in these communities. It all gets very circular.

I’d argue that for cities facing skyrocketing housing prices (including rents), the only justified use of such funds in gentrifying neighbourhoods is the creation of new affordable housing. I am surprised to find myself agreeing with former Toronto councillor Doug Ford (brother of the late mayor Rob) who argued during the 2014 mayoral race that the millions collected from downtown developers should be spent to improve public amenities citywide, including less affluent communities that see little in the way of new development activity, and thus receive virtually no Section 37/45 money.

The point is that municipalities can, in fact, choose to impose a measure of control over the pace of gentrification and the intensity of the real estate speculation that accompanies it—one that could buttress the resiliency and sustainability of the entire city. A mindful approach would recognize that officially enabled gentrification will eventually become a self-consuming force that produces lovely neighbourhoods in which almost no one will be able to afford to live.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

As a wealthy Western nation, Canada enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world. Yet, there are truths about our country that are unfathomable: we have an unaddressed lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, and two-spirit (LGBTQ2S) youth homelessness crisis; widespread homophobia, transphobia, and biphobia are an everyday reality; and, because of this, queer and trans youth who experience homelessness often report feeling safer on the streets than in shelters.

This needs to change. It is not enough to encourage young people to be themselves and promise them “it gets better.” We have an ethical and moral obligation to make it better now. We cannot afford to wait.

Canada needs a national strategy that addresses the issue of LGBTQ2S youth homelessness and meets the needs of this population. Consider the following quote, which illustrates an all too common narrative: “I have no place I feel safe. There’s nowhere to go, and I thought there would be because this is Toronto. If the rest of Ontario has nowhere for me to go I thought Toronto would at least have somewhere.”

LGBTQ2S youth are overrepresented in the homeless youth population, making up as much as 40 percent of homeless youth. Identity-based family conflict, resulting from coming out as LGBTQ2S, is a major contributing factor to youth homelessness. Once in the shelter system—meant to support all young people— LGBTQ2S youth often report minimal support and high rates of homophobic and transphobic violence.

It has taken many years of advocacy, activism, and research for this issue to gain attention and support from decision makers, the public, and the media. A major milestone was the opening of YMCA’s Sprott House in February 2016—Canada’s first LGBTQ2S transitional housing program, an important step in the right direction. But we still have a long way to go.

We need a committed, national strategy to end LGBTQ2S youth homelessness. This will allow us to respond to the unique needs of LGBTQ2S youth in rural and urban communities from province to province, and will place specialized housing with integrated supports at the forefront, as well as comprehensive mandatory LGBTQ2S cultural competency training for staff at drop-in and housing programs.

This strategy must include emphasis on longer-term solutions and prevention. It must do so through engaging shelters, youth-serving organizations, and most importantly youth themselves. Let’s ensure access to safe beds, as well as safe and affirming spaces and environments where youth can bring their full authentic selves. A national strategy to end LGBTQ2S youth homelessness is a promise that we will no longer tolerate homophobia, transphobia, or biphobia. It’s a message to the world that everyone deserves a safe place to sleep and no young person should end up on the streets because of whom they love or how they identify.

Illustration by Dave Donald

A call for co-operative housing reform

After spending the first 23 years of my life living in co-operative housing, I worry “co-operative” has become nothing more than a platitude used to paint a picture of true democracy. Even at the most local of levels, a functioning democracy needs supervision.

Over a quarter of a million Canadians are housed in over 2,000 co-operative housing projects across the country. Whether apartments, townhouses, or a combination of both, co-operatives are established as non-profit corporations, complete with committees and a board of directors, and are—theoretically, at least—run by residents. Residents become members by purchasing a small share in the co-operative and continue to pay monthly “housing charges,” a term used to differentiate the arrangement from “rent” in a typical landlord-tenant relationship.

Many co-ops were created as mixed-income communities in an attempt to avoid the ghettoization of the poor, and rely on individuals assuming a degree of personal responsibility. Members commit to putting in a small number of volunteer hours a month for the upkeep of their co-op, anything from mowing common grounds to conducting unit inspections. Every now and again, members get together and have meetings to elect a board, vote on an eviction, change the bylaws, or sort out any issues that arise, in a one-member-one-vote system.

But these defining features are by no means universal. Some co-ops hire a property manager or co-op co-ordinator and, in rare cases, co-ops are run by board members who do not actually live there. In others, rather than buying shares, members make loans, and some don’t require members to put in volunteer hours.

Crucially, there is no single regulatory body that oversees all housing co-ops. The sector is a muddle of acts, bylaws, and government and non-profit agencies.

The only national, umbrella co-op housing organization is the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada. CHF Canada, itself a co-operative corporation, is primarily a lobbying group, focused on policy changes and acquiring funds from government on behalf of housing co-ops. There are regional associations for housing co-ops, and an agency that took over responsibilities from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation for federal co-ops in P.E.I., Ontario, Alberta and B.C. The other provinces and territories have their own schemes.

This confusion has created a sector which is barely understood by many in it, let alone those on the outside. As a result, the sector is largely left to its own devices, requests for financial records are denied.

Members who raise concerns with the lack of oversight and issues of governance in co-op housing are often given the runaround or subsequently targeted as dissidents. Ken Hummel, a co-op resident from Whitby, Ont., who for the last 15 years has tried to hold his housing co-op accountable by requesting information on audits, raising issues of favouritism, and filing complaints with police and government, is constantly told to find solutions internally.

“I had shared my concerns and complaints about [my co-op’s] governance and management problems with CHF Canada and CHF Canada referred me back to the co-op board of directors to find some resolution with issues,” writes Hummel in an email.

A member in Toronto was recently told by her co-op’s lawyer “to remove my digital footprint anywhere on the internet where I may have talked about co-ops suggesting I was disparaging them or receive a ‘notice to appear’ for consideration for eviction.” These kinds of actions create an environment of fear and submission in co-ops, something most outside the sector rarely understand.

Nicole Chaland, the Community Economic Development program director at Simon Fraser University, established a housing co-op in Victoria, B.C. a decade ago with strong ideals and high expectations. She envisioned a community-supported lifestyle, separate from the “paternalistic” system of a mainstream, managed housing provider. Though she didn’t live in the co-op she co-founded (a stipulation of a financial backer), Chaland saw the factionalism develop.

“The potential for built-in resentment is all there,” she says. “I think housing co-ops are particularly difficult because you actually have to cooperate with your neighbours and there is that opportunity for resentment to breed.”

Chaland also described the fiction she was sold early on that coops are cheaper to run due to lower operating costs. “Every single co-op is doing two things at the same time,” she adds, “you’re running a business and you’re nurturing an association of people. And that means the costs are higher.”

There are, naturally, some advantages to the co-op model. Through her research on housing co-ops, Catherine Leviten-Reid, assistant professor at the Shannon School of Business at Cape Breton University, discovered that members who actively participated benefited from “skills development, the development of self-confidence, social ties and the ability to influence the housing in which one lives.” There is no doubt that many housing co-ops do work well. But there are too many that don’t.

Victims of abuse, harassment, and fraud are left naked before their management, with nowhere to turn for help. By design, many co-op members are economically vulnerable, unable to afford representation or represent themselves.

Co-op housing represents so many appealing concepts, which is why it’s hard to find anybody who doesn’t support it on principle. A recent bill to amend the co-op legislation in Ontario received all-party support. Co-ops symbolize participatory democracy, social justice, redistribution of wealth, DIY—so many progressive movements rolled into one. They’ve maintained the impression they are bastions of true democracy, a place for the people by the people, while the number of people practicing these ideals has become smaller and smaller.

“That’s a small radical subset of the housing co-op movement in Canada,” says Chaland. “This isn’t really part of our culture. We teach competition. We teach persuasiveness, we teach winners and losers. And these things are at odds with co-op principles.”

JOSH HAWLEY is a writer, editor, and musician living in Montreal. He studied journalism at Concordia University