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Canada’s 2019 Housing Strategy Act (NHSA) lays the groundwork for important advances in ensuring the right to housing for all. Two key approaches outlined in the NHSA for communities in greatest need are conducting research and providing participatory ways for those communities to shape housing rights responses. This article presents insights from a project that explored how people with lived experience of housing need and homelessness engage in research on housing precarity in Canada. We review the literature on housing precarity that features people with lived experience as research participants, applying an intersectional framework and acknowledging the settler colonial context of Canada. And, as a research team who has members with lived experiences of housing precarity, we emphasize the importance of meaningfully incorporating people’s lived experiences, seeing deep engagement as a way to advance housing rights by harnessing lived knowledges.

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This article explores how community-engaged, arts-based research methods can enrich our understanding of homelessness, with a specific focus on housing insecurity in rural-urban communities. Drawing on a digital storytelling project in Dufferin County, Ontario, that featured twelve storytellers and eight stories, this article explores the complexities of homelessness that are often neglected in official narratives of housing and home. We argue that the dominant method of documenting homelessness—enumeration through Point-in-Time (PiT) Counts—provides a limited understanding of homelessness and contributes to the invisibility of these problems in rural-urban spaces. We explore how a participant-led, arts-based approach can point to key areas for policy change by drawing attention to housing insecurity as a form of homelessness and highlighting how individual circumstances intersect with structural factors.

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Social networks, and the supports they provide, are thought to be key to the survival of those living in poverty. In light of this, we have examined the social support networks of low-income renters living in market housing and who are in receipt of rent subsidies and assistance from housing workers. Our work is rooted in a partnered research initiative on affordable rental housing for those in greatest need. After 21 interviews with tenants and service providers, we found that participants in our study have limited informal social support and that this support is confined to instrumental rather than emotional dimensions. Many of the participants discussed how their housing helped them leave harmful networks and contributed to their decision to cut ties with former acquaintances. However, it is also clear that the individuals in our study were not without ties. Despite having limited, and also actively limiting, informal ties, participants sought and received extensive material and emotional support from non-profit organizations including harm reduction, youth, and women’s centres, and housing workers. Our findings show that these organizations play an important role beyond material survival and suggest the importance of ensuring tenants are able to access these organizations and that non-profit organizations have adequate resources.

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This paper discusses early reflections on a project implementing intersectional praxis across the life cycle of community-based participatory research (CBPR). Drawing on our team’s inaugural Co-learning Workshop, which included community and academic partners, we share our initial learnings about developing an intersectional approach to housing security. Specifically, we reflect on three key challenges, or promising puzzles, that emerged as we began our collaboration: co-defining intersectionality (across both theory and implementation), integrating intersectionality into understanding the multi-scaled complexities of housing security, and communicating intersectionality’s relevance to a wider network of actors in housing security policy and programming. Drawing from our learnings, we suggest that an intersectional lens is powerful because it attends to the everyday lived experiences of housing insecurity, the interlocking systemic forms of oppression that create differentiated experiences of housing, and the specific contexts in which structural housing inequities take root.

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The search for and replication of scalable models for affordable housing amid North America’s housing insecurity crisis has been frustratingly slow. Governments are flailing—and, so far, failing—as they try to put in place the necessary policies and incentives for the private, public, and non-profit sectors to accelerate the construction of the millions of new affordable units required to confront the crisis. This paper highlights one model whose replication is underway in Winnipeg’s downtown core: that of a mixed-income, mixed-use residential tower offering nearly half of its units at affordable rental prices for marginalized residents and designed, built, and managed with a deep commitment to multi-dimensional sustainability. The catalyst for this initiative is the University of Winnipeg Community Renewal Corporation (UWCRC), a non-profit foundation that works in partnership with community organizations and is now Winnipeg’s leading social real estate developer. The Corporation is the second component of the model. While there are no perfect strategies for solving the housing crisis, UWCRC’s approach deserves to be widely known, deeply studied, and rapidly adapted and replicated at scale by universities, colleges, and other public institutions in urban centres throughout North America. Engaged scholars can play important roles in this effort.

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Housing injustice is a serious public health issue among young women and femmes (aged 18-24) in Canada but the research available on this topic seldom centres the voices of people with lived and living experience. This population is marginally visible in the shelter systems; instead their experiences may be described as “hidden homelessness”. This housing typology refers to situations where someone seeks shelter in ways like couch-surfing, car sleeping, or other short-term accommodations that are not typically recognized as responding to housing injustice. Drawing from a methodology of social constructionism, this paper reviews findings from an arts-based inquiry that sought to answer the research question, “what are the survival and resistance strategies that young women and femmes experiencing housing injustice use to support their wellness and engage with life?” Using reflexive thematic analysis, a zine was created and analyzed to reveal five themes: 1). Affective and Psychological Strategies of Resistance; 2). Survival Strategies and Behaviours to Ensure Material Survival; 3). Felt Knowledge About Good Living; 4). Organized Abandonment and Other Normed Chaos; and, 5). Importance of Human Connection, Solidarity, and Radical Care. The strengths and limitations, along with implications for public health policy and research are discussed.

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In this issue, Wanda Martin, Kerry McPhedran, Shelley Kirychuk, and Lori Bradford, ESJ’s editor-in-chief, explores the concept of engaged scholarship within the realm of housing insecurity and the built environment. They shared their insights and experiences regarding the challenges and opportunities inherent in engaged scholarship, particularly in addressing inequities in housing and the built environment.