A Housing For All banner on a Toronto housing co-op with the one per cent logo from the 1998 campaign for all levels of government to allocate an additional one per cent of their budget to a national housing program.
A Housing For All banner on a Toronto housing co-op with the one per cent logo from the 1998 campaign for all levels of government to allocate an additional one per cent of their budget to a national housing program.

Last week I had a dream, more like a nightmare.

I’m speaking on a stage at a housing conference that has 30,000 people in attendance. My talk is my usual stump speech: we need a real national housing program in Canada. But the conference theme is the Housing First model and people only want to talk about Finland’s success implementing it. Blank faces stare at me. No one wants to listen to me.

Back to real life.

While I’ve never been to Finland, the country is known for topping social indices that measure livability including education, housing, literacy and health.

By all reports, Finland has done a good job ending homelessness through Housing First, but they’ve also been housing everyone else, creating mixed income housing for workers, for middle and low-income families, for artists. In addition, Finland has had a social safety net that knits together prevention and solutions that range from supports for people facing a mortgage crisis, to eviction prevention to jobs and surprise – housing (with lots of saunas apparently).

However, the current reality is that with a more Conservative government Finland is facing a shift that threatens this pleasant scenario. Both trade unions and student groups have been protesting cuts to social welfare, the erosion of employment rights and job security.

My dream/nightmare prompted me to ask this question.

Why do Canadians have amnesia on the historic success of our national housing program and instead look afar for miracles?

Background.

Canada created a fully funded national housing program post World War II. It delivered on average 20,000 new units per year. After 50 years and sadly, without much public outcry, the federal government slashed its national housing program in 1993. The federal government then furthered a social welfare disaster by cutting transfer payments to provinces and territories.

Provinces followed suit with further retrenchment cutting funding for social programs such as social assistance and downloading housing to municipalities.

The rest is history. A catastrophic social welfare disaster that has impacted all of Canada.

If you follow my columns you’ll know I’ve tried to explain my problems with the American born model of Housing First as a solution to Canada’s homelessness and housing disaster.

I even reluctantly added an entire chapter in my memoir A Knapsack Full of Dreams to elaborate. Titled Under the Rug: Housing First’s Inhuman ‘Solution’ to Homelessness and its Terrible Legacy, I chronicle how Canada’s big city mayors enabled the importing of the American Housing First model to Canada in the early 2000s and its eventual cementing as federal and provincial policy at the expense of a national housing program.

The marketing of Housing First was primarily through the concept of 10-year plans to end homelessness (note, it’s now been 20 years and homelessness is catastrophically worse across Canada). Ten-year plans functioned as a smoke screen that governments could hide behind and thus not put their attention to building housing for everyone.

Inattention to the right to housing meant that the financialization of housing had the go ahead to flourish.

I have argued that Housing First became the policy tool to introduce and justify economic and social policies that ensured a further withdrawal of life saving aid to a vulnerable population. Under the umbrella of Housing First came a litany of harmful policies: funding restrictions for community programs that prevented them from providing survival supplies to people outside, streets to homes type programs to remove people from high tourist/business zones, new laws that criminalized homelessness and ultimately the most visible form of state violence – paramilitary encampment evictions.

As a street nurse, I’ve always felt that Housing First pathologized homelessness and created the dynamics to establish who is deserving and undeserving of housing. Deserving if you are addicted, have a major mental illness and especially if you have either of these conditions and you are visible on the street, as opposed to in a shelter. Less deserving if you are a senior, a family with children or a single mom, a middle-aged woman with breast cancer or one of the 80,000 households on Toronto’s social housing waiting list.

Long-time housing advocate Beric German sums up this dissonance:

“Housing First implies that unhoused people are different than others. Thus, they need a different circumstance. It is sometimes referred to as pathologizing homelessness or even a type of identity politics. The reality is that all people need the basics to survive and may need supports. They need income, work, education, child care, affordable housing and more. In particular, housing affordability not only affects whether we are housed or our general well-being but without it there will be long term illness, injury, and lack of future.”

Back to Finland.

An American advocacy group called Invisible People studied Housing First in Finland and produced a documentary titled Finland Solved Homelessness: Here’s How (Spoiler: It’s More Than Housing First).

Like Canada mass homelessness is endemic across the US, worsened by tears in the social safety net and a global pandemic. Aware that Housing First originated in the US but was a miserable failure, Invisible People went on a detective mission to the tiny country of Finland to learn how it had worked there and produced a documentary.

We learn that in the 1990s Finland had 20,000 people who were homeless. Juha Kahila, a Finnish Housing First expert, explains that the country’s harsh climate (sound familiar?) meant that people died on the street. Finland began what is described as its rapid phase of Housing First in 2008. This involved shelter conversions to housing and the building of more affordable housing. By 2022, the country’s homeless numbers were down to 3,686.

Jari Karpinnen, a Finnish Salvation Army manager chuckles as he politely reminds the American interviewer, “You are a big country, you have a lot of money, so if you want you can really do that. Make the change. Housing First comes from the USA.”

As the documentary title suggests, Finland’s success is about more than Housing First. The documentary shows that homeless services in Finland include the key components of skilled street outreach, respecting and listening to the voices of those impacted and supportive housing solutions that include harm reduction, common space for meals, gathering and community building. However, it is the affordable and importantly mixed income housing that is the foundation of the Finnish model.

This is not unique to Finland. Canada has literally hundreds of examples of the same. In the past we excelled in building and supporting innovative housing developments. Beric German and I have led numerous walking tours for politicians, union leaders and the media to highlight successful housing that has housed tens of thousands of people. One of the most successful is the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood in downtown Toronto. People come from all around the world to see it.

A former Finnish housing minister who led their Housing First program sums up Helsinki’s success at building affordable housing. He notes it was a result of both the federal and municipal government funding housing construction “quite a lot”. While he emphasizes homeless people are human beings first and thus deserve housing, he also points out that Housing First has made the city more pleasant for tourists and for foreign direct investments. Unfortunately, it is this latter point that seems to drive the enthusiasm for Housing First in Canada’s big cities.

Back to my dream/nightmare. If I do my own analysis of it, I think it was likely prompted by the fascination for Finland’s Housing First that reached a new height recently.

  • Last week Patrice Bergeron in the Canadian Press reported that Quebec politicians think the Finnish model of Housing First will solve their homelessness problem.
  • A former city planner enthusiastically shared the above article on social media. So did the CEOs of some national housing organizations.
  • Last month a high school student asked me to participate in her extensive research plan to examine Housing First. A high school student!
  • Well-meaning friends began flooding my inbox with Finnish success stories.

Bottom line.

Canada has been doing Housing First for 20 years. As a solution to our housing crisis, and in the absence of a true national housing program, it is a colossal failure. Politicians, policy makers, academics, researchers, even the media to a certain extent have collectively buried their heads in the sand.

Let’s turn our attention, advocacy, activism to push for a real national housing program: social housing that includes supportive housing, public housing, co-op housing and funds for rehabilitation and green builds. Make it for everyone. And yes, governments are going to need to spend “quite a lot.”

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...