National housing strategy must reflect women's experiences
Ottawa's national housing strategy must reflect women's lower incomes, longer lives and roles as mothers, report says.

thestar.com
By Laurie Monsebraaten
Oct. 24, 2016

It is 2016 and Ottawa must ensure its promised national housing strategy includes a “gender lens” that connects women’s lack of affordable housing and homelessness to their lower incomes, longer lives and roles as mothers, YWCA Canada says.

The strategy must also recognize the trauma of women and girls facing sexual violence and domestic abuse and ensure that housing for them includes the needed support services, says the country’s largest organization serving women and girls in its brief to the government’s consultation on the plan.

“For women and girls, housing, homelessness and safety from violence are interconnected,” says the report being released Monday. “Failure to include a gender-based analysis can be a matter of life and death.”

Domestic violence drives 75,000 to 100,000 women and children from their homes into emergency shelters every year, the report notes.

Many more - often young women - never make it to shelters and end up living on the streets “exposed daily to sexual harassment and violence,” the report adds.

“This is the first opportunity in our history to get a national housing strategy that counts women and girls in and takes a serious look at how housing, affordability and homelessness are lived by women and girls,” said the report’s author Ann Decter.

“Women are approximately 50 per cent of the people who are homeless and their experiences are quite different from the common stereotype of the man asleep on the street,” she added.

Since eight out of ten single parents are women, they need affordable housing with room for kids. Women’s lower incomes and longer lifespan relative to men means they need housing across the age spectrum, especially when they are in their senior years, the report argues.

Toronto mother Dana Yates, 37, has struggled with homelessness since she left home at age 14 due to her mother’s drug addiction.

At age 18, she was a struggling mother of two and was forced into sex work to pay rent and put food on the table.

“I did what I had to do to provide for them,” she said. “My whole life has been one struggle for a secure home, where my home wasn’t in jeopardy. There has been no stability for me.”

When Yates’s children were age 5 and 6, she reluctantly sent them to live with their father who was better able to care for them. But the pain of losing them pushed her into drug use.

With the help of Sistering, a Toronto service for homeless and precariously housed women, she was able to kick her addiction and she now helps other women facing similar trauma.

“We need to do something about the poverty women face,” said Yates, who has been clean for three years, but still pays more than half of her income for a tiny bachelor apartment in a house.

As part of the strategy, the YWCA wants the federal government to support research and data collection on housing need and affordability for women and set gender-specific national targets, benchmarks and timetables to improve access.

Ottawa should dedicate funding to replicating successful supportive-housing projects for vulnerable women and girls, including young mothers, indigenous families, women with disabilities and those coping with trauma, mental illness or substance abuse.

The national plan should also include northern housing strategy for women and an Aboriginal strategy with a gender lens, developed in partnership with indigenous women’s organizations, the report adds.

Written submissions on the national housing strategy closed Oct. 21. As of last week, more than 5,600 survey responses, 201 submissions and 87 ideas had been received through the government’s Let’s Talk Housing website. More than 1,670 ideas arrived through social media, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. which has been conducting consultations on the plan since last June.

About 375 experts and stakeholders participated in roundtables and 164 people who have been homeless or are living in subsidized housing, newcomers, Indigenous people and people with disabilities took part in focus groups.

Jean-Yves Duclos, minister of children, families and social development will release a “What we heard” report on Nov. 22, National Housing Day. The government has not said when the strategy will be released.