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Printed from The Vanier Institute of the Family's website at www.vifamily.ca. © 2007.
TRANSITION MAGAZINE The Family Home 
Domestic well-being is a fundamental human need that is deeply rooted in us,and that must be satisfied.
— Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea Do you have a good home? The answer, of course, depends not only on tangible factors (the quality of housing; the safety of the neighbourhood; the proximity to schools, jobs, parks and other amenities), but also on intangibles (the relationships between the people in the home; the memories that live there; the spirit of the community). In the last issue of Transition, Nicholas Bala told us that the law recognizes "the unique psychological significance of the family home." In this issue, we delve into the meaning of home, and also tackle the practical realities—past, present and future—of creating a home for ourselves and our families. The idea of "home" is almost inseparable from the idea of "family," even for those of us who live alone. A home is more than just a place. It’s a feeling, a cherished idea—it’s where we can be ourselves. We all have memories—good and bad—that we associate with home, and that shape our very personal feelings about all things domestic. For me, the idea of home means not a particular house so much as the area where I grew up: a middle-class neighbourhood on the west side of Ottawa. As a child, I loved to escape my family’s crowded house and roam the paths beside the Ottawa River, and the small shops along Wellington Street. My brothers and I remember lugging favourite books to and from the public library, skating at the outdoor rink until frostbite pinched our fingers and toes, watching cartoons at the local cinema, and playing wild games of hide-and-seek with the other kids on the block. I didn’t know I felt any nostalgia for the old neighbourhood until two years ago when I found myself buying a house a few blocks from where I grew up. This was a surprising turn of events for someone who, as a young adult, wanted nothing more than to get as far away from home as possible. I spent my twenties and thirties in Toronto, Venezuela, England and Vancouver. But, in my forties, the claustrophobia I used to feel in Ottawa evaporated like a morning fog, and I moved back to be close to relatives, especially my mother who was still living in the family home. Now, with the family home about to be sold, my little house in the old neighbourhood will soon be the only place that evokes my family’s past. This house, to me, is comfort, safety, privacy, intimacy—or at least the potential for these essential elements of a home. It might not match your image of what a home should be, but then, the idea of home is much bigger than any house. Privacy, Family and the Canadian Home All but the least favoured of us have a dwelling of some sort—a room, apartment, condo, house, mobile home, houseboat, or whatever. Our homes are important to us; we spend much of our lives in them and lavish a good deal of money on them, too. Houses are complex places—objects of family pride, sites of emotional security, and major forms of investment, to choose but three examples. Obviously the dwelling has a history, and so too does family life. What is less obvious is that the everyday experience of living at home has changed over time in Canada. In fact, both our houses and the ways we’ve lived in them have altered in fundamental ways. One of the most important of these alterations has been the growth of personal privacy—the chance, and the desire, to be alone. In a sense the house is a container for family and personal life and, like a container, it gives a certain form to its contents. The size, shape and technology of the house affect the lives of those it shelters, and these features of dwellings have gradually been transformed over time. The family itself has also changed dramatically during the past two centuries, as falling birth rates, increasing life expectancy, and rising living standards have gradually reduced the numbers of those who live together. For these reasons, the relationship between the house and the household—the container and its contents—has altered in important ways. The home life we know today only faintly resembles that which our ancestors knew, just as the houses of earlier centuries were very different from those we enjoy today. In particular, the opportunities we now have for privacy at home are far greater than those our ancestors ever experienced. This fundamental shift is linked to the history of both the family and the dwelling. Size is the most obvious difference between today’s house and that of earlier times. The one-room dwelling is the oldest house type in Canada. It existed long before the coming of Europeans, it was the first shelter built by the earliest immigrants, and it remained a common house form on every frontier from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Even today it survives in our cities as the studio apartment. In fact, dwellings of four or fewer rooms have been the most common Canadian house form from the dawn of European settlement until well into the twentieth century. As long as homes had only a few rooms— certainly until the late eighteenth century and perhaps the early nineteenth—the rooms in small houses didn’t have designated purposes. They served a succession of functions during the daily round of family life: cooking, eating, food production, handcraft production, sleeping. Of course, the wealthy and well-to-do have always built larger homes. We know rather more about these houses because they often were better constructed and maintained, and so have survived much longer. The rooms in larger dwellings, unlike those in smaller homes, were usually dedicated to specific functions. Separate bedrooms emerged first of all—by the mid-to-late eighteenth century in both French and English Canada—and separate rooms for dining and formal social life followed in time. In the homes of the less affluent, the average number of rooms per house didn’t rise until the second half of the nineteenth century, and then only in Central and Atlantic Canada. Since the Second World War, we’ve seen a steady national trend towards larger dwellings; today more than half of all Canadian homes, houses and apartments alike, boast at least six rooms. This gradual shift has occurred over a period of time when the number of people per household was shrinking continuously. In 1881 (the first year for which statistics were available), on average there were twice as many members in every Canadian household as there are today (5.3 versus 2.7). The most important force behind this trend has been the long decline in fertility, which began in Ontario in the early nineteenth century, then followed in Quebec some two generations later, and continues to this day. The post-war baby boom which looms so large in current thinking about population matters in Canada was just a demographic hiccup in the overall pattern of change. During the past two centuries the birth rate in Canada has fallen by three-quarters. Where families once had almost eight offspring on average, now they have about two. Larger homes and smaller families have reshaped family life in important ways. In particular, they’ve created new opportunities for people to claim some household space as their own. Rooms that once were shared are now claimed by individual family members. Children’s bedrooms are an obvious example. Over the past generation they’ve become separate domains, with "Parents Keep Out" posted on their doors. Technological change has also reshaped the home’s interior. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, innovations in lighting, heating and plumbing left their mark on household social relations. Kerosene lamps gradually replaced candles in the middle years of the nineteenth century, providing better illumination at lower cost. In turn, the electric light bulb supplanted the open flame during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—safer, brighter and cheaper still. Urban dwellers were the first to know the benefits of the electric light revolution, which spread quickly to towns, villages, and their rural surrounds. These successive innovations made it simpler and less expensive to light more than one room at a time. Developments in heating had much the same effect. In most parts of Canada, the age-old fireplace had given way to the iron stove by the early nineteenth century. Much more efficient, it was a far superior source of heat. Though first introduced into Canada in 1818, central heating spread much more slowly. High costs limited it largely to wealthy urban dwellers until late in the century, and even then change was gradual. The furnace didn’t overtake the space heater and the stove as the dominant form of home heating in Canada until the mid-twentieth century. Still, when they came, these changes reduced the cost of home heating and improved its quality from coast to coast, allowing families to heat several rooms in their homes at the same time. These improvements in heating and lighting had important effects on domestic social relations, especially on access to personal space. Canada being a northern country, household members normally could use only those rooms that were warm and well-lit, at least during the cold, dark months of the year. Thus, they tended to cluster together to share basic comforts. Even when homes had heaters in several rooms, the cost and trouble of keeping all of them lit at once encouraged family members to gather round a single source of warmth. Kerosene lamps had much the same effect. The revolutions in home heating and lighting made all rooms in a dwelling accessible to all family members at all times of the day in all seasons of the year. The result was that family members no longer needed to huddle together during a long, cold winter’s eve. They could retreat to the greater privacy of a separate focus of heat and light, or to the still-greater privacy of another warm, well-lit room. From the standpoint of household privacy, however, the most dramatic technological change by far was the flush toilet. The outdoor privy was a near-universal feature of the Canadian home from time immemorial until the later nineteenth century. The processes of meeting bodily needs were neither carefully hidden nor artfully disguised, and the odour of human wastes blended into the rich bouquet of everyday life, indoors and outdoors alike. The triumph of the toilet was to change all this. The technology of the flush toilet had been under development since the late eighteenth century, but the washdown model of today was based on a series of British innovations devised during the 1870s and 1880s. Its broad diffusion also depended heavily on access to running water supplies and sewer systems, costly services that spread rather slowly in the nineteenth century. Only by World War I could most Canadian cities and large towns claim that water and sewer systems served the great majority of their households. In smaller communities, the introduction of these services was delayed longer still. The flush toilet had appeared in a few Canadian homes by the early 1850s but it remained a luxury enjoyed by the wealthy few until late in the century. Then, when a superior technology and a watery infrastructure were finally in place, the outdoor privy began its dignified march from the back of the lot to a small room inside the home. Once begun, its progress was steady if unspectacular. In 1941 only slightly more than half of all households in the nation had an indoor flush toilet, in many cases shared with another family, while the outhouse continued to serve the needs of almost all others. By this time, city and town residents had more or less universal access to indoor plumbing but it remained a much less common feature of village and rural life. In fact, the privy didn’t disappear from the decennial census until 1971, when the number of households still using one was too negligible to report. The defeat of the privy has usually been viewed from the standpoint of public health and hygiene: the victory of enlightened social policy over ignorance and disease. But we’ve yet to pay much attention to its influence on one’s sense of self as well as on social relationships. As elimination became confined to a small room indoors, a new and more powerful sense of shame attached itself to the normal functions of passing wastes, as well as to the rooms where they were performed. The result was that home designers took special pains to install toilets well away from principal rooms. The concept of privacy has many meanings, and our experience of it many forms. The family dwelling was one of the principal sites in nineteenth and twentieth century Canada where those concepts and experiences were redefined. Today our cities, our country—and in fact, our world—are much more crowded places than they were half a century and more ago. Yet most of us in Canada now enjoy far more space and privacy than our grandparents and their antecedents ever did. Much of the explanation for this change lies in the history of the house itself, and the ways in which it has intersected with the history of the family. Privacy, Family and the Canadian Home All but the least favoured of us have a dwelling of some sort—a room, apartment, condo, house, mobile home, houseboat, or whatever. Our homes are important to us; we spend much of our lives in them and lavish a good deal of money on them, too. Houses are complex places—objects of family pride, sites of emotional security, and major forms of investment, to choose but three examples. Obviously the dwelling has a history, and so too does family life. What is less obvious is that the everyday experience of living at home has changed over time in Canada. In fact, both our houses and the ways we’ve lived in them have altered in fundamental ways. One of the most important of these alterations has been the growth of personal privacy—the chance, and the desire, to be alone. In a sense the house is a container for family and personal life and, like a container, it gives a certain form to its contents. The size, shape and technology of the house affect the lives of those it shelters, and these features of dwellings have gradually been transformed over time. The family itself has also changed dramatically during the past two centuries, as falling birth rates, increasing life expectancy, and rising living standards have gradually reduced the numbers of those who live together. For these reasons, the relationship between the house and the household—the container and its contents—has altered in important ways. The home life we know today only faintly resembles that which our ancestors knew, just as the houses of earlier centuries were very different from those we enjoy today. In particular, the opportunities we now have for privacy at home are far greater than those our ancestors ever experienced. This fundamental shift is linked to the history of both the family and the dwelling. Size is the most obvious difference between today’s house and that of earlier times. The one-room dwelling is the oldest house type in Canada. It existed long before the coming of Europeans, it was the first shelter built by the earliest immigrants, and it remained a common house form on every frontier from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Even today it survives in our cities as the studio apartment. In fact, dwellings of four or fewer rooms have been the most common Canadian house form from the dawn of European settlement until well into the twentieth century. As long as homes had only a few rooms— certainly until the late eighteenth century and perhaps the early nineteenth—the rooms in small houses didn’t have designated purposes. They served a succession of functions during the daily round of family life: cooking, eating, food production, handcraft production, sleeping. Of course, the wealthy and well-to-do have always built larger homes. We know rather more about these houses because they often were better constructed and maintained, and so have survived much longer. The rooms in larger dwellings, unlike those in smaller homes, were usually dedicated to specific functions. Separate bedrooms emerged first of all—by the mid-to-late eighteenth century in both French and English Canada—and separate rooms for dining and formal social life followed in time. In the homes of the less affluent, the average number of rooms per house didn’t rise until the second half of the nineteenth century, and then only in Central and Atlantic Canada. Since the Second World War, we’ve seen a steady national trend towards larger dwellings; today more than half of all Canadian homes, houses and apartments alike, boast at least six rooms. This gradual shift has occurred over a period of time when the number of people per household was shrinking continuously. In 1881 (the first year for which statistics were available), on average there were twice as many members in every Canadian household as there are today (5.3 versus 2.7). The most important force behind this trend has been the long decline in fertility, which began in Ontario in the early nineteenth century, then followed in Quebec some two generations later, and continues to this day. The post-war baby boom which looms so large in current thinking about population matters in Canada was just a demographic hiccup in the overall pattern of change. During the past two centuries the birth rate in Canada has fallen by three-quarters. Where families once had almost eight offspring on average, now they have about two. Larger homes and smaller families have reshaped family life in important ways. In particular, they’ve created new opportunities for people to claim some household space as their own. Rooms that once were shared are now claimed by individual family members. Children’s bedrooms are an obvious example. Over the past generation they’ve become separate domains, with "Parents Keep Out" posted on their doors. Technological change has also reshaped the home’s interior. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, innovations in lighting, heating and plumbing left their mark on household social relations. Kerosene lamps gradually replaced candles in the middle years of the nineteenth century, providing better illumination at lower cost. In turn, the electric light bulb supplanted the open flame during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—safer, brighter and cheaper still. Urban dwellers were the first to know the benefits of the electric light revolution, which spread quickly to towns, villages, and their rural surrounds. These successive innovations made it simpler and less expensive to light more than one room at a time. Developments in heating had much the same effect. In most parts of Canada, the age-old fireplace had given way to the iron stove by the early nineteenth century. Much more efficient, it was a far superior source of heat. Though first introduced into Canada in 1818, central heating spread much more slowly. High costs limited it largely to wealthy urban dwellers until late in the century, and even then change was gradual. The furnace didn’t overtake the space heater and the stove as the dominant form of home heating in Canada until the mid-twentieth century. Still, when they came, these changes reduced the cost of home heating and improved its quality from coast to coast, allowing families to heat several rooms in their homes at the same time. These improvements in heating and lighting had important effects on domestic social relations, especially on access to personal space. Canada being a northern country, household members normally could use only those rooms that were warm and well-lit, at least during the cold, dark months of the year. Thus, they tended to cluster together to share basic comforts. Even when homes had heaters in several rooms, the cost and trouble of keeping all of them lit at once encouraged family members to gather round a single source of warmth. Kerosene lamps had much the same effect. The revolutions in home heating and lighting made all rooms in a dwelling accessible to all family members at all times of the day in all seasons of the year. The result was that family members no longer needed to huddle together during a long, cold winter’s eve. They could retreat to the greater privacy of a separate focus of heat and light, or to the still-greater privacy of another warm, well-lit room. From the standpoint of household privacy, however, the most dramatic technological change by far was the flush toilet. The outdoor privy was a near-universal feature of the Canadian home from time immemorial until the later nineteenth century. The processes of meeting bodily needs were neither carefully hidden nor artfully disguised, and the odour of human wastes blended into the rich bouquet of everyday life, indoors and outdoors alike. The triumph of the toilet was to change all this. The technology of the flush toilet had been under development since the late eighteenth century, but the washdown model of today was based on a series of British innovations devised during the 1870s and 1880s. Its broad diffusion also depended heavily on access to running water supplies and sewer systems, costly services that spread rather slowly in the nineteenth century. Only by World War I could most Canadian cities and large towns claim that water and sewer systems served the great majority of their households. In smaller communities, the introduction of these services was delayed longer still. The flush toilet had appeared in a few Canadian homes by the early 1850s but it remained a luxury enjoyed by the wealthy few until late in the century. Then, when a superior technology and a watery infrastructure were finally in place, the outdoor privy began its dignified march from the back of the lot to a small room inside the home. Once begun, its progress was steady if unspectacular. In 1941 only slightly more than half of all households in the nation had an indoor flush toilet, in many cases shared with another family, while the outhouse continued to serve the needs of almost all others. By this time, city and town residents had more or less universal access to indoor plumbing but it remained a much less common feature of village and rural life. In fact, the privy didn’t disappear from the decennial census until 1971, when the number of households still using one was too negligible to report. The defeat of the privy has usually been viewed from the standpoint of public health and hygiene: the victory of enlightened social policy over ignorance and disease. But we’ve yet to pay much attention to its influence on one’s sense of self as well as on social relationships. As elimination became confined to a small room indoors, a new and more powerful sense of shame attached itself to the normal functions of passing wastes, as well as to the rooms where they were performed. The result was that home designers took special pains to install toilets well away from principal rooms. The concept of privacy has many meanings, and our experience of it many forms. The family dwelling was one of the principal sites in nineteenth and twentieth century Canada where those concepts and experiences were redefined. Today our cities, our country—and in fact, our world—are much more crowded places than they were half a century and more ago. Yet most of us in Canada now enjoy far more space and privacy than our grandparents and their antecedents ever did. Much of the explanation for this change lies in the history of the house itself, and the ways in which it has intersected with the history of the family. In her book, Dilemmas of Trust, Trudy Govier explores the profound effect trust and distrust have on our relationships and on our sense of self. In this excerpt, she describes the importance of the family home as the place where trust begins. Characteristically, a family lives in a household, although not every family is contained within a household. Family members may leave for a time, as when a man takes a job in another country, sending part of his wages home and returning every few months to visit his wife and children, or a grown child leaves for a summer job or university elsewhere, still retaining emotional and financial ties to her family of origin. Nor does every household constitute a family. Non-family households are, in fact, rather common, as, for instance, in the shared-accommodation arrangements that frequently occur among students. For most of us, though, family, household, and home coincide. Home is a special place of safety, warmth, security, and comfort. At home we can relax, put down our guard, and be ourselves. We can express ourselves in the physical surroundings of home, in selecting furnishings and decorations, food, plants, pets, and sleeping arrangements. Most people can take a home for granted. They have a place that is theirs, that provides considerable privacy and respite from the wider world. Robert Frost described home as the place where, if you have to go there, people have to take you in. We have, or should have, a virtually unquestioned refuge at home. We have recourse to home to rejuvenate and replenish ourselves. From the public world, we come home to relax, eat, sleep, clean ourselves and our clothing, and be ourselves in our own secure place that we have established as separated off from the broader world. Home should be secure and safe, cozy and warm. There we take shelter from the wider world and receive emotional support from companions. We can let go emotionally, lapse into rages, weep, fight, throw tantrums, or sulk. Not that this behaviour is especially welcome at home, but it will be more tolerated there than among friends and colleagues. Home can be the sanctum it is because of boundaries. There is a respect for people’s living space; the outside world does not enter without permission. We trust others outside the household to respect our boundaries and treat our home as a private place. To a considerable degree, people are able to preserve control over who is in the home. Those who do not live there must ask permission to enter, typically by knocking or ringing the doorbell. If they are not given permission, they will go away. The idea that home is a reserved space for those who live there, set off from the public world, enterable by outsiders only when they are granted permission, is one that few of us would relinquish. To have the privacy of our homes, to feel safe and be able to refresh ourselves emotionally and physically, we have to assume that others will not enter at will; that means that we trust them to respect our rights over our private space. The special nature of home is founded on social norms that we trust other people to respect. When our home is violated by outsiders or becomes an unsafe place, we feel a special horror. Victims of domestic robbery often report being disturbed as much by the sense of invasion as by financial loss. The idea that unknown persons have broken through the physical and psychological boundaries of home to rifle through desks, drawers, and cupboards, seeing all the paraphernalia of our domestic lives, is profoundly disturbing. At home we should feel safe—safe from the outside world because we trust that people who do not live there will not enter unless invited, and safe with others who are in the home because we trust that they will respect our boundaries and possessions, and support us emotionally, physically, and economically. In Western cultures, it is important to have one’s own private space within the home, whether this is a separate bedroom, our own workspace, a drawer no one pries into, or merely a single journal or bundle of letters. We trust that others who live with us will respect this privacy. The husband trusts his wife not to go through his papers and decide which should be discarded. A mother trusts her children not to root through her underwear drawers or rifle through her correspondence and papers. Children quickly gain a sense of their own possessions and their own space, which they expect their parents and siblings to respect. Home should be safe and secure, a place of respite for individuals and families. And it can be so only because we trust each other to respect boundaries. Home is not only a psychological state but a physical place. If we keep possessions, run households, and take refuge in several different physical places, then to that extent we have several homes. The cottage is an obvious example. When we travel temporarily to work or study, we acquire a secondary temporary home. Even a hotel room may become a "home away from home," invested with minor domestic comforts. For whatever reason, Western societies tend to place great value on the privacy and cosiness of home. Those who have no home are to be pitied, even when they are relatively affluent individuals who have no home because they have chosen a nomadic style. Travel may bring on a longing for home, family, and domesticity, a longing so acute that even mundane objects such as dish towels can make us feel lonely and wistful. Far more pitiful than the traveller without his family are the literally homeless, forced to exist on the streets, sleeping in the open or under bridges or staircases, using public toilets and washing facilities, and begging for food, work, or money. With nowhere to go for rejuvenation, the homeless tend to look tired and dirty all the time. They live constantly under the public eye; they can assert no boundaries over a physical place that is their home. For them, the world is a cold and brutal place, without warmth, security, or companionship. Most of us are fortunate enough to have homes, and most make our homes with other people. Typically, the family lives together at home, providing love, companionship, support, security, and nurture. Much of the significance of the family lies in the fact that it provides this physical centre of intimacy and privacy, where we have companions and can restore ourselves. From the safety of home, we move out to the public world and back again. Those who can take home for granted have a safe and comfortable place to be, a venue for self-expression and material maintenance, a place for physical and psychological restoration. "A ‘typical’ homeless person is no longer a single, alcoholic, adult male. Youth, and families with children, are now the fastest-growing groups" among the homeless. —Anne Golden et al., Taking Responsibility for Homelessness: An Action Plan for Toronto, Report of the Mayor’s Homelessness Action Task Force Facts about Homelessness in Canada Homelessness is a growing problem from sea to sea in Canada, as shown by the following sampling of facts from the National Housing Policy Options Paper: A Call for Action—Municipal Profiles (Federation of Canadian Municipalities, June 1999): In Vancouver:
In Edmonton:
In Calgary:
In Saskatoon:
In Regina:
In Winnipeg:
In London:
In Toronto:
In Ottawa-Carleton:
In Montreal:
In St. John's:
The Homeless Experience "Why are we here? Most of us have no choice. Whatever the "Today, homelessness has a face, and it is increasingly poor, vulnerable and female," says Seneca College professor of sociology Diane Meaghan in her recent paper, About Face: The Social Construction of Homelessness among Women in "Toronto the Good." To understand the experience of being without a home, she interviewed 37 women in the Greater Toronto area who are, or have been, homeless. What she found, among other things, was that "homelessness means more than being poor and without accommodation; it suggests disengagement from society in terms of a lack of connection with family, friends and community activities. The construct of a home associated with family, support, warmth and acceptance is the antithesis of women’s homeless experiences." How do women lose their homes? Each woman has her own complex story, but Dr. Meaghan found that "a substantial number of women" cited "abuse and the subsequent loss of their homes within a context of poverty as common reasons for homelessness. These women were homeless predominantly because home had become unsafe." Sadly, women escaping from violent homes often meet with more violence, either in a shelter or on the street. As well, almost half had "experienced the loss of a family member through separation, divorce or death in the immediate past." One young woman who is divorced and homeless said, "‘I have memories of better days. Lack of education, being poor, and bad relationships played a big part in the loss. My biggest problem is that I should have stayed in school.’" Here are the stories of five of the women interviewed by Dr. Meaghan: "Due to ongoing disputes with her parents, Janie and her two-year- old daughter had to leave home before she was able to establish herself financially. When she attempted to set up her own home, a decrease in welfare payments made it impossible to maintain an apartment. The lack of affordable child care resulted in Janie being unable to look for employment. She lived with a friend for a few months but, when that relationship ended, she temporarily placed her child with the Children’s Aid Society and took up residency in a shelter. Janie then faced new difficulties in trying to get a job without a permanent address, a telephone number or a place to clean her clothing." Tesi, a young Angolan woman living in a shelter, was the only member of her family to survive the most recent civil war in her country. Despite the tragedy of her past, she "is resolved to continue her education. She is studying at a local high school in the mornings, in anticipation of leaving the shelter to find work and accommodation on her own." "The process of becoming homeless involved a series of interlocking factors for Sandra," who is staying in a motel room paid for by Social Services. "She was beaten by her father and forced to leave home in her early teens. Years later she was again forced to flee from her home when her husband also became violent. Without relatives in the city to whom she could turn for support, she reconciled with her husband. She began anticipating his needs to placate him, but the violence escalated. She ‘hit rock bottom’ when he beat her so severely her jaw was broken in two places and she lost two front teeth. She was forced to flee with two children under five years of age. She managed for some time to survive with little income and in precarious housing arrangements, but finally decided out of necessity to apply for welfare benefits." Forty-five-year-old Rachael "currently shares an apartment with her husband," but in the past "she lived on the streets for five years. A very articulate and intelligent woman, she was quick to point out that she has been denied access to housing and employment because of her race, but tries not to let that ‘interfere with taking control of my life.’ She regrets spending ‘too much money on drugs,’ a habit she has since eliminated." A construction accident has left her husband a paraplegic, and Rachael now spends most of her time caring for him. Recently, their rent was raised to $750 a month, which means they need to look for cheaper accommodation. Rachael hopes "not to encounter ‘racist landlords who smile in your face, but don’t want to rent to Blacks.’" Sixty-eight-year-old "Lillian, a bright and articulate woman, is dressed in a black sheath dress with a strand of white pearls. She laughingly talks about the wrinkles on her face and how her two children and four grandchildren helped to put them there. As a former school teacher, she easily slips into discussing statistics and theories concerning the decline of the middle class." In many ways, she is like other seniors—except that she is homeless. Influenced by friends and family who convinced her she was no longer capable of managing her own affairs, Lillian signed over control of her finances. "Unable to consistently pay her escalating rent when her funds were depleted, she found the door to her apartment padlocked one day, with her belongings in a box near the garbage chute. Lillian subsequently lost most of her life savings," and now spends nights at one of the few women-only shelters. "Her days are spent stopping by drop-in centers for two meals a day." Addressing the question of the government’s role in the problem of homelessness, Dr. Meaghan says, "Governmental responses to homelessness have, for the most part, concentrated on crisis intervention and the use of emergency services. This approach is both expensive and ineffective in reducing and preventing homelessness. Though necessary, hostels do not address the underlying problems that force people to seek emergency shelter. The critical problem underlying homelessness is poverty, which has been intensified by government cuts to welfare, health care, public housing and social services." If one is looking for a key word to characterize the housingmarket of the twenty-first century, the word is diversity:diversity of buyer groups, employment opportunities,lifestyles and, of course, housing choices. If the end of thetwentieth century is any indication of things to come, the twenty-firstcentury should be an exciting ride. The composition of the Canadian family has been transformed.The past few decades have seen a significant increase in thenumber of singles, single parents and seniors. So far, architectsand developers have responded to the unique needs of thesegroups with very little imagination. Globalization has swept likea storm through our economy, eliminating job security andexpanding the realm of employment into home offices. Ourlifestyles? Rapid development in information and domestictechnologies has overhauled our perspective of the world aroundus. The environment? For the first time, humans have begun toacknowledge that they have something to dowith the planet going out of whack. How is home-sweet-home faring in the midstof all this? If similar changes in the middle of the twentieth centurygave birth to the North American suburb and popularized the wood-framehome, it seems that we are geared up for the next revolution. Whatis going to be the driving mind-set that will respond to these trends?Flexibility. Segmentation rather than homogeneity. The multi-familyhome will take over from the large, single, detached housethat presently constitutes 65% of all Canadian homes. The mind-set of the future will be a unique approach to design—one that allows flexible arrangements of interior spaces. In athree-storey structure, for example, we would have the choice ofbuying one, two or three levels within a unit. An aging couplemight live on the ground floor of a unit where their daughter andson-in-law occupy the top two floors. In an adjacent unit, thelower floor could be a home office in a two-storey residence, andthe top floor could be rented to a single person. The structurewould be sold by the level. Small size and efficient buildingpractices could bring the cost of housing down to the cost of anupscale car. How will we buy homes? Gone will be the days of scouting for ahouse in a new development on Sunday afternoon. Using theInternet and virtual reality instruments from the comfort ofhome, you will visit the living room of your dreams and even beable to turn on the TV. From a digital catalogue, you will selectcomponents or pre-arranged packages as you or your architectdesigns the bathroom that suits your lifestyle. You will be able toreplace a bathtub with a multi-jet shower. A single person coulddo without interior partitions, using furniture as room dividers.No longer will the offerings be limited to a choice between mapleor oak kitchen cabinets. What about paying for it all? As youmake up your mind, the computer will indicate the total,allowing you to fit your selections to your budget. Unlike today, layout decisions will be reversible. If your needschange as your children grow, and you want to, say, move the familyroom—no problem. It’s going to be as easy as switching seats in yourminivan. Electronic user manuals for the home will make their appear-ancein the coming decade; a CD-ROM will be handed to you along with the keys to yournew home. On disk will be plans indicating the location of specially designed conduits in the floor and ceiling. No more complicated than a cartoon-like drawing that you get with a self-assembly Ikea package, the disk will containinstructions on, for example, how to dismantle and reassemble awall. We will depart from the gypsum wallboard and wet jointsas we enter the era of clip-on, pre-finished sheets. You could dothe work yourself or engage a home service company, one of anew breed of businesses. Their job? To help you adapt your hometo your age, and change your house around in a few hours. How will it all work? The past decade marked a quiet revolutionin home construction with the introduction of new technologiesand products. Many of them will take hold in the coming years asmarket necessity forces builders to overcome conservatism. Thecommon trends for these products will be less reliance on naturalresources and increased opportunity for flexibility. Homes will no longer be built on site. They will be prefabricatedin plants, in either a modular or panelized form. Canadianconstruction will become a year-round affair, as building a housewill be more about making choices at the computer and fittingparts together in the plant, than about pounding nails into two-by-four’s at a muddy building site. Modularity will facilitatechoice as the automated assembly of parts will be similar inprinciple to kids’ Lego. The content of natural lumber in homeswill decline dramatically. A typical 2,000-square-foot house nowuses over thirteen thousand board feet of framing lumber. Thisfigure will decrease by at least half. New compositions of woodand plastics, wood and metals, or just metals, will take over.Recycled content will increase in construction materials, andhomes will be hailed as environmental miracles. They will also be extremely well built. Within the next decade, ahighly affordable home with virtually zero heat loss will beshowcased. Office interior systems will finally make the big leapto residential, with greater emphasis on pre-fabricatingcomponents off site rather than building on site. The wiring ofhomes will be done mostly in plants. As units or panels movethrough assembly lines, they will be "smart-wired" with coaxialfibre-optic cables. The cables will link to a main computer serverthat will run all our utilities. In the name of efficiency, flexibilityand lower costs, building codes will allow conduits to pass alongthe outside walls in special moldings. All conduits, includingdrain pipes, will be made of flexible plastics with dryconnections. The flexibility of these plastic pipes will transformplumbing work: instead of the current installation methods usedfor metal pipes, the new way to install plumbing will be muchlike threading a cable in electrical work. And the stacking ofkitchens or bathrooms will no longer be required in a multi-storeycondo, as small, quiet drain pumps will permit theplacement of utilities anywhere on a floor. In the twenty-first century, constructing, buying and living in ahome will be an all-new experience. For a close analogy, look atcars. Slick industrial design, automated production and smartmarketing have transformed the auto industry. The time hasarrived for the home to undergo a similar revolution—one thatwill give Canadian families better homes for less money.
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