Arctic Homelessness Hardest On Women

And a big part of the solution, the researchers say, would be for Ottawa to admit its decision to stop building social housing was a mistake. "It had a huge impact on northern Canada and it's one we're still struggling with," said Fuller, director of the Yellowknife YWCA, the lead agency on the study. Although the study wasn't intended as a census, it estimates that at least 1,000 women in the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut are homeless - couch surfing with friends and relatives or holing up in makeshift accommodation from emergency shelters to abandoned buildings. At least another 1,000 children trail along behind them. Few in the Arctic have an easy time finding a place to live. Waiting lists in Nunavut for social housing routinely exceed 1,000 families. With Canada's youngest population and highest birth rate, the territory would have to build 273 units a year just to tread water - vastly more than the 70 or so the Nunavut Housing Corp. averaged between 2000 and 2006. But Fuller said the study suggests women have the hardest time of all. "They don't have the depth of economic resources to fall back on when things go wrong," she said. The best jobs in the N.W.T.'s booming mines and energy sector are going primarily to men, said Fuller. And in Nunavut, with Canada's highest rate of family violence, it's the women who are often forced out of the homes they share with their partners. Family dysfunction, both a cause and a result of homelessness for women, means that mothers are left searching for a bed for themselves and their children. "The men seem to come and go," Fuller said. Often, the study says, women are forced into a sexual relationship with a man just because he has an apartment. "You go with this man even though you don't want to," one woman told the researchers. "You don't love him, you don't like him, but he has a bed to sleep on. You have no choice but to follow him because you need a place to sleep." Territorial governments have been trying to develop a private real estate market in the hopes builders will put up more housing. But house prices in Nunavut exceed $300,000 and rents for two-bedroom apartments have reached about $1,400 a month in Yellowknife. Fuller said social housing has to be the solution for now and called on the federal government to develop a national housing strategy and return to direct funding of social housing, at least in the North. ... http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=n111452A

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