May 2024
Critical Perspectives / Criminology & Social Justice. Winnipeg MB.

The recognition of the right to adequate housing by the Government of Canada in the National Housing Strategy Act (NHSA) is a critical moment for reframing housing as more than an asset or service to be provided. Informed by the civil society housing justice movement that fought for it, the right to housing in Canada asserts housing as fundamental to our individual and collective wellbeing. The NHSA, however, does not recognize people with experiences of criminalization as among those groups in greatest housing need, nor does it recognize the intersectionality of their experiences with identified priority groups. This is despite the evidence that recognizes homelessness as a pathway into and an experience shaped by criminalization, incarceration, and release. Ultimately, the confirmation of a legal right to housing and the policy directions being offered have limited transformative value when rooted in the legal, political, and social systems that perpetuate social and spatial injustice. This paper is a provocation to move beyond the limited rights-based frameworks of housing justice by thinking of housing through transformative justice and abolitionist praxes. It frames the present housing crisis, with its deep-reaching roots in settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and cis-heteropatriarchy, as more than injustice but also as a space of extensive individual, interpersonal, collective, and intergenerational harm. Using preliminary research from a larger project on the housing journeys of criminalized women and gender-diverse people, this paper explores how home is, how it fails to be, and how it can better be a place of harm reduction, mutual aid, healing, and freedom.