the human right to housing
process obstacles agency
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.
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 Gould’s self- contained mobile sleeping unit.
1 ‘Participation is a right’ was recognised in the Vancouver Declaration at the first UN Habitat conference in 1976.
Graeme Bristol
20 on site review 45: houses + housing
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