10 minute read
the human right to housing
Graeme Bristol
housing is a right
Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights identifies access to medical care, education and housing as rights. In Canada, we can thank the persistence of Tommy Douglas for our ongoing access to universal health care. We are sorely in need of another Tommy to push us towards acting on the right to housing. It’s not only the right to housing, though, that needs attention. There is an ongoing crisis – one that requires more than talk. In 1987 United Nations held the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless. Nearly 40 years later we still can’t define ‘affordability’ much less build it. Politicians, planners and architects keep talking as the bottom falls out and the citizenry responds with tent cities which are almost daily torn down by authorities.
As a now-retired architect, I have been thinking and researching this ongoing crisis in housing since my glazed student eyes were opened when the world came to Vancouver in 1976 for the first United Nations-Habitat conference.1 After returning to Canada from a long career abroad, I became involved in a response to the housing crisis in British Columbia. It is a story that begins in hope.
microhousing, perhaps
In Victoria, BC, nearly a decade ago, newly elected mayor Lisa Helps addressed the growing crisis in housing in a series of workshops on microhousing — groupings of stand-alone houses, each 300 ft 2 or less. She brought in an architect from Portland and a housing activist from Eugene, Oregon who were having some success in building microhousing communities, and who followed the principle that the right to housing should first be directed towards people who were well outside the housing market (hint: if we continue to think of housing as a ‘market’ we will fail to understand it as a right). After a week of workshops and seminars, local activists and supporters organised to see if microhousing should be implemented locally.
Guided by the principle of ‘nothing about us, without us’, meetings were held at Our Place in Victoria, a community centre and shelter for the homeless. At least half of the participants were people who had been or were currently homeless, many of whom were using Our Place as shelter. A steering committee collected and exchanged information about the common search for access to land, financing, basic requirements for units and for the community (design parameters), criteria for membership in the community and other such vital factors.
It met once a month, subcommittees met bi-weekly, reporting their progress to the steering committee. Microhousing Victoria was registered as a BC non-profit, a legal entity that could open a bank account. Seed money was provided by the City to help pay for the ongoing expenses of the committees.
1 ‘Participation is a right’ was recognised in the Vancouver Declaration at the first UN Habitat conference in 1976.
To garner support from potential funders, providers of access to land, the planning and building departments and City Council, the steering committee needed something to show. An architect was hired to provide presentation material; out of that came sketches, PowerPoint presentations, renderings and provisional costs.
In the meantime no actual housing was built. The committee had, though, developed design criteria for housing which were little different from that for any tenant or homeowner – close to services, access to nature, privacy. There was little on their list that would differentiate these residents from any other citizen.
Two key issues that did stand out were harm reduction and autonomy. Harm reduction in drug use is critically connected to decriminalisation and direct access to relevant services. Autonomy is something a typical homeowner assumes – variations of ‘my home is my castle’. However, this is not an assumption that can be made by the homeless and those living day to day in shelters or in tent cities. Having a place of one’s own is an undelivered and deeply desired dream which must be recognised.
From the listed criteria, preliminary designs were prepared, reviewed and amended by the people who planned to live in them. Microhousing Victoria had provisional approvals from the building department, the fire department, the planning department, and the majority of City Council. However we had no land on which to build. We talked about parking lots, land left vacant awaiting development, unused city land, church land.
While the search for land continued, one of the steering committee members, Peter Gould, borrowed the use of a workshop and built a prototype on his own with scrap materials and his own money.
It was a successful temporary mobile shelter, no bigger than a shopping cart that unfolded to provide the length of a bed; lockable so it was possible to store some belongings and small enough and light enough to be pulled or attached to a bicycle.
Peter’s prototype of temporary and extreme microhousing was a hit on the local news. Here was the homeless addressing the crisis in their community by building something themselves while the planners, politicians, and experts talked – something of an instructive parable of the housing crisis writ large. What are slums, after all, but the efforts of the poor to stake a place in the city, a leverage point for opportunity. Peter had addressed an alternative access to shelter built with what little he had. He gave it to a woman he knew who had been evicted from shelter space because she was disruptive as a result of ongoing mental issues. She found a place to put it where she felt at least a little bit safe. Of course, one of the problems with her use of the mini-microhouse was that she was now isolated from the community. In part, she wanted to be away, but it was hardly safe behind a bush in a park.
Around this time, the city offered a piece of land for a prototype cluster of microhouses. The steering committee felt confident that a door was finally opening, the first of many to come.
However, there was a little hitch.
As the site was used for tenant parking for an adjacent house, if Microhousing Victoria used the site, the tenants would have to use street parking which only allowed hourly parking, not overnight, which meant the bylaw for that particular area would have to change – a change that would have to go through the processes of City Hall with final approval from Council.
The other hurdle was the proposed lease between the City of Victoria and Microhousing Victoria. Lawyers for the City were concerned that Microhousing Victoria had no history of managing housing for the homeless. They could only agree to the lease if it partnered with a local organisation having a trustworthy record of such management. One of their sticking points was that irate neighbours would call the City at four in the morning to deal with these prospectively unruly neighbours. As noisy neighbours and disputes are part of life in any neighbourhood, rich or poor, why should these tenants be treated any differently? Nevertheless, liability is an issue for any landowner, in this case the City itself.
In their attempt to meet these requirements, Microhousing Victoria approached several local organisations with whom to partner. These pointed out that they already had their hands full and were only funded for their current responsibilities. Microhousing Victoria would have to find additional funding to be able to pay staff to undertake such management – management the steering committee wanted to avoid or at least minimise, considering the importance the committee membership placed on self-management.
These were obstacles Microhousing Victoria was unable to overcome. The Steering Committee dwindled to an ‘executive committee’. The only productive result was Peter’s minimicrohouse, self-financed, self-built and entirely outside the system. And yet, the ‘system’, the City Council, the Mayor, the planning department and the building department were entirely supportive of microhousing. It was an initiative promoted by the mayor: everyone was behind it. Volunteer construction workers, architects and social workers were on the steering committee as technical support to a broader community of people seeking homes in the city. With all that support, how could it fail?
If there is a hero in this story, it is Peter who designed, financed and built a tiny shelter for one person, while the experts listened and talked and planned.
This is not to say that planning for the execution of a larger idea of housing is pointless. It isn’t. But there must be clear steps forward, action to make the words, the planning, mean something in the world. Can there be a crisis without an immediate response?
There were lessons learned. Eventually the City took some of the ideas coming out of the steering committee and built temporary housing in the Royal Athletic Park in Victoria. The many months of talk resulted in something that was built, but not by Microhousing Victoria. A City project managed by Our Place opened in 2021 as temporary housing, closing in the fall of 2023 when the residents of ‘Tiny Town’ moved into permanent housing. It reopened in the spring of 2024 — a notable success that in the continuum of housing, this is a viable and needed form of transitional housing.
A few other lessons run deeper. Direct action is not just an anarchist slogan. Direct action is critical to solidarity. Solidarity is bound by a vision which must be visible. Visibility is created through direct action in and by the community. Peter’s effort was visible. It was on the local news; it was a morale booster for us and for the community. However, Microhousing Victoria was not able to build on Peter’s first step.
Another underlying issue is that this is all temporary housing. Land was sought that could be used on an interim basis. Everyone knew, even from the design parameters, that this housing would relocate. In the back of everyone’s mind was the threat of yet another eviction. Although more permanent and more like a house than a tent, it was still temporary and at the whim of the development sector and their economic imperatives.
It doesn’t much matter if it’s the police telling you to ‘Move along’ or if it’s urban land economics saying the same: You don’t belong here. There is a higher and better economic use for this piece of land. In due course you will need to be out of sight, out of mind, out of the market, and out of our policy initiatives.
Samuel Beckett said: ‘No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ I thought this nihilistic when I first read it, now I find some resonance. We learn with each failure and each of those failures helps to move us forward and solidarity can grow. There is a vision statement in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its first article: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’
This crisis is about dignity and solidarity. There must be an embracing architecture of belonging, of hope, not quite achieved by a tent.
coda
A few weeks after the photograph of Peter with his prototype was taken, the little blue mini-microhouse was stolen and never seen again.
GRAEME BRISTOL is the founder of the Centre for Architecture and Human Rights https://architecture-humanrights.org He practiced architecture in Vancouver and Papua New Guinea after which he taught architecture in Bangkok
