People marching with Housing for All banner.
People marching with Housing for All banner. Credit: Cathy Crowe Credit: Cathy Crowe

Call me nostalgic but as a nurse I really miss our country’s national housing program. It was good medicine when it existed. Housing is the most important determinant of health. 

In the Home Safe film series, a young child explains:

“When you have a home, it’s exactly like a protection, sort of like a force field from stuff that are dangerous. So, sometimes, when you are homeless…if you know that you’re getting a decent home and you’re going there soon, you kind of get overwhelmed with happiness and that’s what a lot of people want now.”    

From its founding after World War II to 1993 when it was eliminated, the national housing program created 20,000 new units of affordable housing annually. 29 years later, the 580,000-unit shortfall (29 x 20,000) is an open wound in the country’s social fabric. Then, add in the loss of housing due to gentrification.

Patterns of destruction

I am haunted because for over 30 years as a street nurse I see patterns of destruction repeating themselves.

I would use the analogy of the film Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray’s character, the TV weatherman Phil, spent years trapped in a time loop in Punxsutawney on Groundhog Day. But it’s too funny —  plus it has a happy ending.

Instead, I liken today’s situation to a black hole with time distorted and a cycle of destruction that keeps repeating itself but incrementally worsens over time. The pattern includes clusters of freezing deaths, depression era outdoor encampments and disease outbreaks in shelters. Only this time the disease is not tuberculosis, it’s a global pandemic. No one escapes.

Today, inattention to infrastructure funding has resulted in the normalization of substandard shelters, cots instead of shelter beds, contracted out food services and security guards at shelters.

National Housing Strategy makes homelessness worse          

A new report by the National Housing Council points to serious flaws. The vast majority of loans have gone to private developers. Of the 35,000 units produced in five years, not all are truly affordable, and no units created by the Rental Construction Financing (RCF) initiative have met the needs of people experiencing homelessness. 

The report states, “We estimate that only about 3% of units in RCF-funded developments studied would be both suitable for and affordable to low-income households.”

Professor David Hulchanski, a leading housing advocate notes, “We can assume 97% of that funding helped to further financialize housing, inflate rents and house prices, and increase homelessness.”

The report notes that the Rapid Housing Initiative was introduced in 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It points out that it is only this initiative that was developed to specifically meet the urgent housing needs of vulnerable groups. This is done through supporting land acquisition, construction, and conversion of existing housing.

Embedded now in federal, provincial, and municipal housing policy is Housing First policy, the term itself being a good example of Orwell’s 1984 term doublethink. Housing First sounds great but it really means housing for some, not for all.

In my memoir A Knapsack Full of Dreams, I describe the opportunistic rollout of American Housing First policy into Canadian policy:     

“In 2008, filmmaker Laura Sky and I attended a national conference on homelessness while we were in Calgary to film Home Safe Calgary. To our surprise, we saw that an American was featured as the keynote speaker and there was quite a buzz about him. Philip Mangano was indeed a charismatic and enticing speaker. He implored the audience to take up the Housing First model, calling it the American dream of a home for everyone. We later learned that Mangano was widely considered an evangelical proponent of Housing First, known by some as George W. Bush’s “Homeless Czar” while he was head of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. We were puzzled at his keynote billing at the conference. I mean, homelessness was not exactly diminishing in the United States, nor was the George W. Bush administration known for implementing progressive social programs such as health care or housing.”

Canadian governments including big city mayors lapped it up. It was convenient and allowed them to target funding to remove the most visible from the streets to house them — people with mental illness or who use drugs, people who began to be referred to as  “the chronics,” as in chronically homeless. 

Housing First is a case study in neoliberalism     

Housing First coincided with other neoliberal policies that brought us the problems we’re experiencing today. The mantra of those policies is emblematic: cut services, they’re inefficient; cut supports, they’re too expensive; eliminate shelters, they’re a blight on the neighbourhood. 

Provide cheap housing instead, the argument goes, at the expense of shelters or programs that provide support. A current expression of this can be seen in Toronto’s modular housing initiatives.

Not only did Housing First become the tool to justify economic policies that ensured further withdrawal of life-saving aid such as shelters, but it also smothered advocacy and critical thinking.

Alliances dedicated to Housing First sprung up across the country, funded by governments to function in the role of convenor of partnerships, cheerleading spokespeople, and in some cases to distribute government homeless funding. Common in alliances’ approach is their commitment to ten-year plans to end homelessness, an obsession with street counts and opposition to the expansion of shelters. Their support for Housing First is ironically within a policy landscape that is not funding housing in any meaningful way.

Housing First is invasive. Instead of being considered with a critical lens it is slowly being absorbed into university and college curriculum as best practice. Researchers rarely tackle it. One exception being A.J. Withers who includes a chapter on Housing First in their new book Fight to Win: Inside Poor People’s Organizing.

We have been shocked     

To use a Naomi Klein term: “We have been shocked.” In her ground-breaking book Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein outlines numerous examples of populations who are already devastated by disaster and tragedy such as Hurricane Katrina. They then suffer an even worse fate at the hands of politicians, developers, and governments who take advantage of chaos and crisis to introduce what would have normally been considered regressive policies.

Today, there is no question that unhoused people are suffering a worse fate than being homeless and in a shelter. Regressive policies are more aggressively denying shelter and housing as a human right.

The distortion I see through the black hole has now expanded to include:

  • Unhoused people who are now forced to sleep on transit vehicles in cities in Canada.
  • Unhoused people who are now sleeping in transit shelters and too frequently, their frozen bodies are silently carried away.
  • Evictions of homeless people from encampments are now militarized.
  • Cities are literally destroying tiny shelters that were placed in parks, built with care in order to protect people living outdoors.
  • Neglectful COVID-19 policies that include closing of physically distancing shelter-hotels, closing of COVID-19 recovery sites, and isolating infected people in situ in crowded shelters.

It also includes a complicit silence by the alliances. 

To learn more and support strong advocacy on this issue, follow Shelter and Housing Justice Network and FRAPRU.

Cathy Crowe

Cathy Crowe

Cathy Crowe is a street nurse (non-practising), author and filmmaker who works nationally and locally on health and social justice issues. Her work has included taking the pulse of health issues affecting...