Small Town Week, Episode 1: Can we build new housing ourselves?

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Jordan Heath Rawlings I could pick you up right now and put you on a random flight and then take you for a random drive and drop you in a town anywhere in this country. And there’s a decent chance you’d be someplace that’s dealing with housing problems. As we’ll learn during this special week here at the Big Story. Small towns and big cities have more and less in common than we think. But this is one issue basically, everyone understands. Canada does not have enough affordable places to live for the people who need to live in them. And perhaps nowhere is that crunch felt harder than in the north. Everything costs more up here from groceries to basic supplies to yes, houses. And the result in Nunavut is a huge reliance on an overwhelmed public housing framework. But it doesn’t have to be that way. How do we know that? Well, because for years, it wasn’t. For decades, the area that would eventually become today’s Nunavut was building homes regularly. Simple homes, but good homes. The people doing that work were the people who would live in those homes. So why did that program stop. And would bringing it back in some form offer a glimpse of a way out of the crisis we are facing?

I’m Jordan Heath Rowlings. This is Small Town Week here on The Big Story. This week is our attempt to highlight issues that communities outside of our major cities face and to offer a platform to the kind of on the ground, local and independent journalism. It is under threat across the country. You probably don’t live in the communities we’ll visit this week. You might never have heard of them. But their problems are often your problems and vice versa. So let’s get out there and take some trips. David Venn is currently a journalist based in Toronto, but recently he was a writer and editor based in Iqaluit where he wrote about a unique housing program in the Nunatsiaq News. Hey David.

David Venn Hi, Jordan. Nice to be on. Thank you for having me.

Jordan Heath Rawlings We could start this story in any number of small communities up there, but, since you painted a couple of pictures of it in your writing, maybe, maybe just tell us about Rankin inlet. Where is it? How big is it? What’s it like there?

David Venn Yeah, for sure so basically in Nunavut there’s, there’s three regions. And, Rankin Inlet is the hub of the Kivalliq region. It’s home to about 3000 people. It’s on the mainland, so it’s, it’s, it’s fairly flat. There’s a lot of hunting that goes on there. The Kib Lake’s known for its abundance of Caribou. Rankin started as a mining town and, and people started settling there in the late fifties and, and, and early sixties cause there was a nickel mine operation there. Now there’s a gold mine there. And I, I feel like a lot of people would maybe even recognize it’s staying because it’s where Jordan Tutu was the first Inuka to play in the NHL, it’s where he grew up. Other than that, it’s pretty much just kind of, you know, your standard town, hockey arena, couple boat launches, parks, restaurants, all those sorts of things.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Well you begin your series, that we’re gonna talk about today with the story of the home of Martha and Robert Hicks? What’s their house like? How did they come to own that house and when?

David Venn Well, their house is beautiful. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s spacious and, and you get a real sense of just being at home as soon as you walk inside there. Martha always jokes that the outside looks like a haunted house cause it’s a little bit worn on the outside. But like I said, inside it, it’s very nice. They’ve done a couple extensions of renovations on the place. They came to own it in, when was it? In, in, I think 87. They were, they were living, in, in public housing for about 15 years together. They had a few children, you know, they had, they had good jobs and everything and they had a solid income, but, they couldn’t get outta public housing cuz there wasn’t enough, affordable housing or private housing, available. So they applied to this thing called the Home Ownership Assistance Program. And, they got the materials sent to them on a lot, and, and they, they built the house themselves and, and moved in in September in 1989.

Jordan Heath Rawlings That’s so cool. What is the Home Ownership Assistance project? Where did the idea for the program come from? Why was it created?

David Venn It’s, it’s known as HAP for starters, I’ll call it that, just to, to shorten up the name a little bit. So HAP was basically a program that the government of the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation ran between like 1983 and 1992. Some of the documents kind of have some different dates thrown around. Basically just traded home ownership for sweat equity so clients could apply for the program. There was just a number of criteria that had to be hit. You had to be, you know, over 19 years old, you had to be, you know, living in the territories, among a few other things. And you could apply for the program, get a plot of land from the hamlet, and, you know, eight months later, the, the GNWT, the Government of the Northwest Territories would ship up a bundle of materials in time for the summer and early fall building season. And the clients would build their own home. You know, they would often have some, some guidance from a supervisor or project coordinator, friends and family would often help. And, that home would just be theirs. The government was they were giving residency a five year loan that would be forgiven. And if at any time the house was sold, you would have to pay off the balance of that loan.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So you mentioned they would get, some assistance or supervision or friends and family would help. I am not a handy person at all. I imagine that, that living up there, you are probably a little more handsy and hands-on by nature. But how does it work practically in terms of the more complex parts of building a house. And here I’m not talking about, you know, putting up the drywall or the walls, but talking about load bearing stuff, electricity, plumbing, you know, the kind of stuff that would probably baffle a lot of beginners.

David Venn Yeah, for starters, I moved up there and I am, not too good with my hands either. So it’s funny that you mentioned that. I was definitely sitting there, speaking with some of my, some of the, you know, some of the people that I spoke with and, when they were telling me just the simplicity around, oh, what I built the house. It, it, it was not a big deal for them. They were just like, yeah, I built the house. We could put the house up in, you know, a, a month or something. To me that was, that was, that was kind of mind boggling. The, the plumbing and electricity, the, the GNWT would actually hire an electrician to come around and do that part of it. Similarly, it would be, be this kinda same thing with plumbing, although I do believe that some people actually did their own plumbing. When I first moved up North, I kinda realized how, useless I was with in terms of surviving. And, being able to do some of those more practical things because a, a lot of people up there were just able to, to build a home. They did build lots of stuff with their hands. They’ve had to, you know, I knew we’d have had to survive up there for a very long time. And they, they just kind of learned to adapt and it was almost like a natural ability for some of them. As far as the structures of the homes went. They were, you know, fairly simple. I wouldn’t call ’em, you know, glorified cabins, but they’re not huge, you know, monsters, homes with a lot going on, right? They’re, they’re kind of basic structures and, people, like I said, were just kind of able to, to build them. now that being said, there of course, were some clients that didn’t have previous building experience. And that tended to be an issue sometimes. But you know, often that was met with having friends and family come over. You know, there we’re talking about small communities here, where your next door neighbour is your, your, your brother, and your cousin. And, and so everyone kind of pitched in a, a lending hand to help build these homes.

Jordan Heath Rawlings This sounds like an amazing program and it’s definitely one of the reasons we wanted to talk to you because, obviously we’ve covered the housing crisis in so many parts of this country. In terms of this program. How widespread was it and, you know, do we have any idea now how many homes exist because of it that were completed?

David Venn Yeah, actually, and before we move on from that, Jordan, I just, I forgot to mention something. You asked about how the program started. It’s pretty interesting. I think it was in the 1970s. around that time, the federal government had come to own most of the housing units in the Northwest Territories, which by the way, at the time included Nunavut, up until, right 1999, or sorry, April, 1997. Basically when, when, since the government owned all this housing, the government wanted to find ways, the territorial government, to start increasing private ownership over homes, but they didn’t know how to get it done. And there was a, group of people who basically beneath the tree line started chopping up trees and milling them and, and building their own homes out of it. And so the government looked at that and thought, well, if these people are, are chopping up the trees themselves and building their own homes, what happens if we can just package materials and, and send it to people, and have them build it on themselves? And so that was kind of formalized into what we now call HAP, have a few years, later in terms of how far it spread and, and how many homes it created. According to some government documents, there were just over a thousand half houses built in, in the decade, you know, spanning 1983 to 1992. And it was throughout all the Northwest Territories, as I said, included Nunavut at the time. And, yeah. So that’s pretty far, you know, that’s, that’s over 50 communities between them and, you know, obviously some got some more, some got less. But when I was walking around Rankin Inlet, they were almost like cul-de-sacs just filled with HAP houses of people who, you know, passed them on from one generation to the next, or who ended up selling them once they couldn’t afford the bills anymore. Once you talk to anybody, you could drive around town, they’ll just start pointing to all the HAP houses. Now that’s a HAP house. That’s a HAP house. it’s in the minds of so many people in the community.

Jordan Heath Rawlings As we consider programs like this as potential solutions or partial solutions to housing crises around the country, the first question I know that will come up is cost. This sounds really expensive. You mentioned that previous to HAP, the government owned most of the housing. How did the cost of the HAP program compare to creating more public housing or or housing more people that way?

David Venn So, in 2022, NHC spent, 161 million, to build 175 public housing units. That’s, you know, roughly $923,000 each. It’s just a lot of money. We’re talking like apartment style units here, multiplexes, that sort of thing. And beyond that, it spends a ton of money, obviously on maintenance and, and utilities. And other expenses, 224 million in 2022. And the corporation really doesn’t get that much back in rent payments. Last year they got 17 million back, so that, that’s just 7.8% of, of the maintenance utility costs. Then you look on the flip side, the government spent $75 million in total on, on HAP, and each house cost about $70,000, but adjusted for inflation, that’s, that’s $130,000, you know, today. That’s just a huge difference. Yeah, I mean, $130,000 for a house. Compared to roughly $923,000 for a house. And to be fair, that doesn’t include like, you know, how the price of materials in post covid world. So that would be an added expense. But we’re still talking, you know, a huge discrepancy between those two numbers. And I, I think one glaring point in all this is that, if HAP were to come back. The money that would be saved on trying to promote home ownership would just be astronomical. You, you could sit, that money that you would save, could then go towards more public housing units, which the territory needs anyways. And it’s a way to basically offload people, into public housing that are very much so suited and would love to be in their own house. It’s just, there’s no option available for that to happen.

Jordan Heath Rawlings We’ve been speaking about this program in the past tense, and you just mentioned if HAP were to come back, what happened to it? If it’s such a good program and so popular and you know the money makes sense, why isn’t it still around?

David Venn I asked so many people this when, when I was doing all the interviews for this series and, and no one really knew why. Everyone was just like, well, it just kind of disappeared one day. I later learned that the government’s point of view on it was that there weren’t enough people to build the homes anymore. What we were talking about at the beginning of the interview, Jordan, you know, with, with people being able to build the homes. Apparently that just kind of ran out and, you know, people didn’t have the skills necessary. The government was growing increasingly frustrated with like, I guess yeah. The skills that people had or lack thereof, to build these homes. What happened was they just decided to, to cut the program in favour of a few other housing programs and that was it. There were some houses that, remained unbuilt unfinished, and they had to send government workers to go and complete them. And I’ve also just kind of heard from a few different people that, some of the materials didn’t even end up being used for houses. They were used for other things. So I think it just, the program kind of fizzled out. And the idea now is, is do people still have that skillset? You know, has that come back into some of these communities? I would guess that that’s partially where, where NHC is at right now and trying to figure that out.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Given all that and given the end of the program, what’s the demand for housing like right now in Nunavut? Listen, I know it’s tough all over Canada, but try to gimme a sense of, where the crisis is at right now. You did a whole series on this.

David Venn So, yeah, the, the situation in Nunavut is, it’s really big, you know, it’s, I’d like to say it’s dire. We had a former MP, that actually brought, brought this to the table quite often and she even did a report on housing. Her name was Mumillaq Qaqqaq, and she was with the NDP, she traveled to Naujaat, which is one of the communities that I travel to. And, she went to 10 houses. They weren’t public housing units, but they were houses and they were all in, in very poor, you know, condition. And they were all overcrowded. I believe she said that, that one of the houses had about 14 people living in it. So, Statistics Canada, reported that 115 out of 205 public housing units are of, you know, poor quality in Naujaat. And now yet that’s a lot of houses. Just ignoring for a second, the housing that’s in poor condition. The, the public housing, wait list in Nunavut, is 3000 people, Nunavuts in a position where it, it needs to house, you know, another 3000 people more because the houses that are being lived in right now, are overcrowded. And then on top of that, you have houses that anywhere else in Canada, you know, people wouldn’t really be living in them. It’s just that people don’t really, like I said, have, have an option in Nunavut to go elsewhere. You know, conditions are harsh up there. We’ll need places to live. And what’s available to them right now is, is public housing that, you know, some, it’s, it’s, it’s often moldy. Like I said, it’s overcrowded and, it, it’s really affecting people’s mental, physical health. And so that’s why when you look at something like HAP you think, well, this, this program has been, you know, gone for, for 30 years. How many people could it could be helping today that are in these positions?

Jordan Heath Rawlings Well, is anybody fighting to bring back HAP or even just something like it, I guess if the public housing situation is so dire, what are the options here for Nunavut? Because obviously as you, to your point, the status quo is not working.

David Venn Yeah, I I don’t really know if anyone’s fighting for it. It, it’s just this thing that like vanished and, and it’s, I think what’s crazy about it is I would speak, actually most of my sources in the series are elders. And, you know, they were just filled with, with these stories of people in their neighbourhood building these houses and how their house was built and what it was like moving their family in there. They talk about like the quality of the build, what they did with their houses and, and what it meant to them to have a home. It is something that so many people in Canada take for, they, they just, they, they speak about it, in such high regard. And then I actually spoke with some, some younger people in Rankin Inlet, and I asked them about HAP you know, these are people in their, their twenties and, and early thirties. And some of ’em didn’t even really know what I was talking about. You know, they, they mentioned they had kind of heard the program. They didn’t know much about it. Some of ’em didn’t know it, all others kind of knew that, that the house that they grew up in, was, was their parents, you know, their parents, got the house through HAP, but many of them didn’t know everything about the program. And I think that that’s part of why bringing this kind of series and bringing this sort of story to the forefront was so important. It’s because it’s almost like people wouldn’t even know what to fight for. Like who, who knew that there was a program 30 years ago that that worked better than any program the government of Nunavut is using today. But it just doesn’t exist anymore. And as far as anybody could tell, no one was trying to bring it back. Right now, like I said, the options for to to get a house in Nunavut are, if a house goes up for sale, it’s, it’s incredibly expensive. And houses don’t go up for sale very often. You would have to be like, you know, fairly wealthy to build your own home up there. The, the cost of materials, the cost of shipping them up there, getting the land, which is a whole other issue because a lot of the infrastructure, in some new communities, in particular Rankin inlet, isn’t up to snuff to, to take on the capacity of a bunch of new homes. You know, when a multiplex gets built, at least you can fit in 30 units into, or 10 units or five units or something into a multiplex where they can start to figure out how they’re gonna get water and get rid of sewage and that sort of thing. But to build your own home, those things just aren’t really, really possible.

Jordan Heath Rawlings The last thing I want to ask about, and you know, maybe bringing back the program in its former capacity is impossible, but the legacy of a program like that, it’s something you kind of touched on a tiny bit, you know, what kinds of stories do you hear from the community about, what it’s like to build your own home and then own it, in a place where public housing is everywhere? Like what does this do for people compared to, you know, spending half a million or a million dollars on a home and moving in?

David Venn Well, I think in Nunavut specifically and in in the third part of the series I introduced, he’s an ecologist his name’s Bill Reese. He’s an ecologist at UBC and he talked a lot about the secondary benefits of HAP, you know, like you get the house, but what else are you getting? His big thing was that it really increased community pride. When I spoke with Lynn Rudd, who, was a, counselor at the ranking inlet Hamlet. She grew up at a time where, just after, you know, the, the mining room there with the nickel mine, she heard a lot of elders growing up kind of look around town and say, I, I built that, I built this, I built that. Like, do you remember when we did this? Just the sense of being able to, to walk around your town with your family and friends and know that you kinda had a role in building that up. Bill was, was big on, on the pride aspect of things and just giving people that chance, like that, that chance to, to gain agency over their life, to, to build something up for themselves is way better than being handed anything like, you know, public housing. Where you’re, you’re given this unit, you have no real strong connections or ties to it. You, you know, depending on if you work or if you don’t work, you have to pay X amount of money for it. You don’t really feel like you’re building your life up towards anything. But when you build your own home and move into it, just that sense of ownership, and agency is something that, that can’t be lost in this conversation. It’s such a huge part of it. And most of the people that did build their HAP house would say, you know, something very similar to you. And, and I remember when I was speaking with Helena Gupta, an elder from Ranking Inlet, she was talking about how when, you know, predominantly the men would finish the houses, they were all very proud of what they had, what they had accomplished. In, in the same vein, part of the issue with the public housing is that a lot of people, you know, don’t necessarily take care of the units. There’s a lot of issues with public housing. You know, that, that people say the units aren’t built good enough, that construction companies rush through it just to get the paycheck and they don’t really consider how, how the build, you know, can last up north. The housing corporation I’ve heard them say that, a lot of people don’t take care of their units, but when you build your own unit, you’re a lot more likely to take care of it. And it’s a lot, you know, it’s a lot more likely for it to last longer than if people were kind of, you know, not treating it very well and damaging it and that sort of thing. The, the government of Nunavut has a program right now that they’ve, they’ve kind of put out the framework for it. It’s called Nunavut 3000. The, the goal is to have 3000 units built in Nunavut, by 2030. Now, they’ve done a lot of great press for it because it’s, it’s, you know, it’s, sounds like this just great, fantastic plan. There’s a lot of skepticism on if they’re gonna be able to get it done or not. But in that plan, they’ve said that they’re going to try to bring back. A version of HAP. Huh? It’s, it’s their goal. They, they know how popular the program is. They, they think that they might be able to do it in some capacity. But there’s, they haven’t done all the studies on exactly how it would be done yet. So it’s, it’s a loose promise. So by 2030, hopefully, if we’re talking about this again, you know, we’ll, we’ll have some, some different ways to describe the new rehousing situations. Hopefully there will be a lot more affordable houses. There will be, some, you know, market price houses, some transitional homes, and ultimately maybe happen that.

Jordan Heath Rawlings It’ll be fascinating to watch and, it’s great to talk about the housing crisis in a way that can focus on solutions. So thank you, David.

David Venn Of course, thank Jordan

Jordan Heath Rawlings David Venn writing in the Nunatsiaq News. That was The Big Story, episode one of Small Town Week. I hope you’ll stick with us as we visit towns across the country and find some truly unique stories and solutions. You can find every Big Story episode at TheBigStorypodcast.ca. You can always talk to us on Twitter @TheBigStoryfpn. You can always write to us, the address is hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca, and you can call us (416)-935-5935 and leave us a voicemail. The Big Stories in every podcast player. If it lets you please rate and review and tell your friends. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rowlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.