Canada will never be able to solve its homelessness problem unless it listens to people who have lived experience of being unhoused or without the option of choosing where to live.
That’s the theme behind the Social Housing and Human Rights conference, slated for April 20-21 at the Winnipeg Convention Centre and at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg. The conference is putting a heavy emphasis on facilitating the mobilization of housing advocates. It includes presentations from Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative (CHEC) Executive Advisor Steve Pomeroy and Leilani Farha, Global Director of The Shift and a former United Nations special rapporteur on housing.
Alex Nelson is a researcher and community organizer who is helping to organize the participation of people who have lived experience with homelessness for the conference. They know what it’s like not to have housing. They spent a decade of their youth in a rotating cycle of couch-surfing, shelter-living and foster care before getting a scholarship to university at the age of 18 and finding some stability in their living conditions. Now, as a 28-year-old PhD student, Alex works as an advocate for those experiencing homelessness and as the Community Outreach Coordinator for the National Right to Housing Network.
“For most of my life, I’ve experienced different forms of homelessness and that really fundamentally shapes who I am as an advocate, and how I think about the issue of homelessness today, and how I work to address it,” they said in a recent interview.
And what they see is a system that’s broken and getting worse.
“We look at how Canada is falling short of advancing the right to housing, and how Canada can advance the right to housing. So I hear from people who are experiencing some of the worst violations of the right to housing in Canada all the time. What I’m coming to realize is every time it feels like we are closing a gap, or that something is moving in a positive direction, there are so many other ways that people are experiencing harm within the system as it’s currently arranged and aligned.”
Because of the run-up in housing prices over the last decade, combined with the recent rapid rise in mortgage rates and inflation, more Canadians are struggling to pay the cost of shelter than at any time in several decades. While affordable housing costs are supposed to constitute a maximum of 30 per cent or less of household income, many people are paying 60 per cent or more, Nelson said. People living in such conditions are vulnerable to homelessness. But, often, it’s not a single event that sends them spiraling into that state. It’s a combination of circumstances, including whether they have support and access to resources.
“There’s a writer that I really like who talks about privilege as a buffer that helps protect you if things go wrong,” Nelson said. “And I think that, for a lot of people who experience homelessness, they don’t have a very big buffer.”
A lot of attention has been focused on encampments, leading to clashes with the authorities and police. But encampments are just one face of the problem, they said. For every visible person who is unhoused there are three who are hidden. For Nelson, that meant sleeping on couches at the homes of friends and family. Others are staying in abusive relationships. They said more work needs to be done to determine the number of hidden homeless and to develop supportive policies to help different groups. The issues facing women, gender diverse, and Indigenous peoples often aren’t recognized because they don’t fit standard stereotypes.
“The most common reason that people had most recently experienced homelessness was due to the break-up of a romantic relationship,” Nelson said. “But when you think about the common story that is told about homelessness, and what causes it, that is nowhere in that understanding. And so I think it’s really important for us to really shift the stories we tell about homelessness because there are so many more people that experience homelessness than numbers currently can estimate.”
They said it’s also important to have Indigenous community leaders making decisions by, and for, their communities, noting that: “There are amazing, amazing, Indigenous community responses that are working at building housing strategies for Indigenous peoples in urban, rural, and Northern spaces.”
Another element of homelessness that was revealed in a survey Nelson was involved with in 2020 was that 79 per cent of respondents said they lived with a disability.
“Most people had three or more disabilities. That’s also really important because it shows how experiences of homelessness are not experienced evenly and are intersectional. Our system is aligned in a way that punishes people with disabilities and forces them into situations of poverty.”
“It’s really important to think about the very complex ways that these things are interconnected. It can really help us when we’re thinking about how we can prevent homelessness, and who we need to be thinking about at the centre of our policy making.”