Well, I think we have to start from where people are, not where we think they should be.
Twenty years ago we did low-barrier housing because I experienced homelessness. My goal was to get women out of the cold. How they behaved and my expectations were secondary to that. Now, 30 years later, everybody is on a trend talking about low-barrier housing as if it were a new thing.
That's how community people are: everything is low-barrier, because they're so inclusive. I think of low-barrier housing as housing controlled by community people, designed by community people and delivered by community people.
A community from the Northwest Territories contacted me today. It wants to develop a housing project, but to do it, the housing corporation is insisting the housing become the property of the housing corporation, not of the community. That's a case of “don't do it that way”.
The other thing they talked about is vandalism in small communities. I said we're interested and we have the support of construction workers to train women to construct and maintain their own housing so that vandalism isn't an issue.
I think it's a question of tying education and skills into housing models and having diverse housing models. Women I know don't want to live with five other women and 50 other kids; they want their own home and they want to be able to support their own families in an appropriate way.
I could go on about lots of different solutions. There are many. I've seen them and I've seen them work. I'd like to have a deeper conversation with people about that.