Entangled in the Housing Complex
All photos courtesy of Jordon Hon – https://www.joho-photos.com/
In this post you’ll find:
- A brief threaded trail of how tangled up my work has been in the last twenty years.
- How housing in Edmonton is tangled up as well.
- An introduction to the Housing Complex.
- Lessons in entanglement.
Important links:
- The Housing Complex site at Taproot – https://edmonton.taproot.news/projects/housing-complex
- Especially read the Introduction by Tim Querengesser here
- The Alberta Real Estate Foundation for funding the vignettes (thank you!)
Creative Entanglement
If you’ve read any of my other posts, you may have noticed the convergence of several narratives in my life and work over the past twenty years. I became involved in issues around housing and homelessness through playwriting. A play called Starless led to involvement with Edmonton Street News, which led to a short film, This Is Where We Live, that led me to create an endowment fund for the repair of affordable housing, EAHMF (Too complicated to be an acronym), and somewhere in there the digitization of Edmonton street newspapers. Those engagements with the issue led Taproot Edmonton to think of me when a project came up about housing.
All these projects are tangled up together, and if you’ve ever tried to untangle string (or narratives) that are all twisted together, you know how it works. You pull one string, and it tightens a knot inside the big, twisted ball. You back another string out and discover that you created more of a knot than you had in the first place. In other words, it’s a mess, and no matter what you do, everything you do affects everything else in the big, twisted knot.
Housing Entanglement
Housing is like that. We are all entangled in the housing knot, whether as renters, owners, investors, builders, advocates, policy makers or landlords. Every time one string gets pulled – say interest rates go up – that tightens the noose around the pocketbooks of people with mortgages. Or say that house prices go up, which helps people selling or building; this in turn makes it harder for people with lower incomes to purchase homes. Where one person benefits, somebody else might suffer unintended consequences. I’ve been a renter, an owner, and a landlord, and I’ve benefited from selling a house at a significantly higher price than I bought it for. This helped me, but that increase in housing prices didn’t benefit people trying to get into the housing market. The housing system is all tangled up – it’s complex – and everybody has a different relation to it.
That was the idea that started out the Housing Complex project with the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness and Taproot. We wanted to tell stories of real people with lived experience with different connections to the housing ecosystem. We wanted to do it in a way that used their own words instead of editorializing or pulling clips out of their interviews. We wanted to interview a range of people to show that everyone was involved in some way or another.
My role was to find twelve different people with twelve different viewpoints on housing in Edmonton, interview them, create vignettes from their interviews, let them review them for accuracy, and then provide them to Taproot.
You can see all the vignettes here – Housing Complex Vignettes.
Lessons in Entanglement
Bad things happen to good people. All the time. Some people have the support networks or resources (personal or otherwise) to overcome the bad things that happen to them. Some people don’t.
We tend to forget how important community is in creating a stable society and point instead at individuals. Community comes in many different forms. It could be the community of the unhoused, it could be a community of faith, it could be a geographical community based on shared housing. If we undermine or denigrate how other people form community, we’re doing a disservice to everyone.
All of us will have mobility challenges at some point. Rob MacIsaac gifted me the term “temporarily abled” to describe this concept. Whether it’s from accident, sickness, or age, at some point all of us will need accessible housing. So why don’t we build everything accessible in the first place?
It’s really easy for point fingers at other members of the housing ecosystem and blame them for problems in the system. I like to envision it this way:
Get twelve people from different parts of the system, ask them to sit in a circle, and point toward someone across the circle who they think creates problems in the system. Then ask them to turn 90 degrees to the right. They’re now pointing at somebody else’s back. Then ask them to look behind them.
An important proviso to number four: some people have more power and agency in the system than others. The factors dividing those with more power from those with less power are not definite, are interdependent, and can change in different situations. However:
- having financial resources seems to be one of those factors
- the ability to pass on increased costs to others is another factor
- where you’re at in the spectrum of being temporarily abled is another factor, and that changes.
We shouldn’t expect any one group or type of individual to bear the burden of either fixing housing insecurity or suffering from housing insecurity.
With thanks:
Karen Unland at Taproot provided editorial and project leadership, and along with Jim Gurnett of ECOHH provided guidance and support throughout. The Alberta Real Estate Foundation provided funding, Jordon Hon created some amazing photos, and the team at Taproot created a web container and a whole range of articles providing context about housing in Edmonton. About 140 people answered a survey that helped us determine the most important stories to tell. The interviewees allowed us access to their stories, and without them there wouldn’t be a project.