Construction centre is central to Fort Good Hope’s housing vision

Fort Good Hope’s K’asho Got’ı̨nę Housing Society will receive millions in federal funding to support a construction centre. The society plans to deliver more than housing.

The funding was announced several weeks ago. Cabin Radio delayed publication of this article while the community was under an evacuation order related to a nearby wildfire. Residents returned home a week ago.

The K’asho Got’ı̨nę Housing Society says the money will help it address housing needs as well as the unreliability of existing economic and education opportunities, while fostering sustainable growth in the longer term.

At the centre of the plan is the construction centre, which is owned by Ne’rahten Developments Ltd, the business arm of Yamoga Land Corporation.

Edwin Erutse, president of the Yamoga Land Corporation said the centre will allow Fort Good Hope residents to “build our own homes right in our community using local labour, local resources as much as possible, and keep the wealth in our community as much as possible.”

“That’s our dream. That’s our goal,” Erutse said. “We want to start building our own homes in our community.”

In the NWT legislature last month, Yellowknife North MLA Shauna Morgan said the construction centre will offer a “heated indoor industrial space where community members will be trained and employed year-round in modular home construction, rather than having to take on seasonal or short-term jobs.”

She called the centre “an opportunity for housing to be designed and constructed in alignment with local needs.”

Erutse says the project will answer the call of his community, where he said residents had spent decades living in ever-worsening housing conditions.

In research published earlier this year, Kristel Derkowski focused on Fort Good Hope in an examination of the historical, legislative, and practical conditions that shaped the northern housing crisis.

“More than 20 percent of the community’s population was experiencing housing insecurity or a need for emergency shelter services in 2019,” Derkowski stated.

Of the community’s then-570 population, nearly 100 individuals were experiencing housing insecurity and in urgent need of a home, according to a report released by the K’asho Got’ı̨nę Housing Society in the same year.

The society said many residents were living in “hidden homelessness,” a form of transient living where people temporarily stay with members of their extended network.

“The people that are feeling the brunt of it are the young people, young mothers, young families, and single mothers – single people altogether,” said Erutse.

“We’re focusing in on the younger people, trying to find some solutions for them.”

“The economy is not the same as other large centres,” said Arthur Tobac, the housing society’s business manager.

“There are people not making enough money to actually own their own home, so no new homes were being built here.

“People are not able to have a home of their own. So, because of that, it affects education, it affects employment, it affects wellness as well.”

Tobac says this understanding has shaped the housing society’s goals, driving a focus on developing access to homeownership.

“In the early 80s, our leaders back then, they actually did create a functional housing society,” said Erutse. “We have faith in our concept because we said: our leaders did it back in the day and it worked.”

“It wasn’t just putting houses on the ground,” Tobac said. “It was enabling your people to be able to look after themselves.”

Erutse says the emerging construction centre is central to the vision of housing that generates homeownership, year-round work and educational opportunities – independent from government public housing.

Housing challenges

Fort Good Hope is currently a “non-market community,” meaning a private housing market does not exist. A 2021 survey found that 46.2 percent of residences in Fort Good Hope were owned homes, while 53.8 percent were rented.

Less than half of the housing in Fort Good Hope was considered “acceptable,” according to Derkowski’s research.

“As an average across non-market communities, the rate of households in unsuitable or inadequate condition is more than five times the national average,” Derkowski’s paper states.

Housing researchers like Julia Christensen have described northern public housing as “welfare colonialism,” in which government social programs left Indigenous people increasingly dependent on the state.

Derkowski’s research depicts the shift from land-based lifestyles to government-dependent lifestyles as an amalgamation of decisions made over years.

“Settlements were created around obsolete economic drivers,” Derkowski told Cabin Radio, giving the examples of fur trading posts and whaling posts.

“When those settlements were placed there and rent or mortgages were being collected in cash – first by the federal government and then by the housing corporation – there was this fundamental problem created, where people didn’t have the opportunity to make the cash that was being collected on a systemic level.”

The introduction of cash-for-housing created a “money trap” in communities without a consistent cash-based economy and a dependence on government-delivered public services that previously did not exist in northern communities and persists today, according to Derkowski.

Meanwhile, public housing initially established by the federal government and then administered by the territorial government is lacking ongoing investment.

“Federal contributions to the operational budget of the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation began to decline in 1996, with an aim to reach $0 by the year 2038,” Derkowski’s paper states, referring to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s commitment to stop providing operations and maintenance funding for public housing by that year.

That means the burden of paying for the upkeep of that housing is shifting to the territories, to municipalities or to other providers.

Fort Good Hope’s success

Since its launch in 2016, the K’asho Got’ı̨nę Housing Society has launched men’s transitional housing, established support for apprenticeships for residents across the Sahtu, and is creating a program for home maintenance and repairs.

The housing society’s 2020 strategic action plan lays out these main objectives:

• administer housing and safe shelter for vulnerable residents in the community;
• improve home repair support and accessibility;
• construct new homes; and
• increase staffing and program efficiency.

“It wasn’t until we really looked at the whole housing issue, really sat down with community members and organizations such as the housing corporation at that time, other government departments, that we really began to see the gaps in all of the programs and structures,” said Tobac.

“We wanted to really try to get to a point where we’re actually delivering repair programs to everybody, not just to the few that Housing NWT deemed eligible. We did take a look at stuff like the barriers to accessing housing programs and we documented that.”

Erutse says Housing NWT is on board with the community’s planned construction centre.

“We established a good working relationship with the housing corporation, with CMHC – the federal government – and everyone in our community,” said Erutse.

“We’re trying to educate everybody as to what we’re trying to achieve and how we’re trying to achieve it. We’re taking control away from the government as much as possible and saying let’s start doing this ourselves.

“There’s no turning back. I see that link between self-government and everything is about decision-making. Let’s try to make all the decisions here locally.”

Correction: July 17, 2024 – 10:20 MT. An initial version of this article stated K’asho Got’ı̨nę Housing Society owns the emerging Construction Centre.

K’asho Got’ı̨nę Housing Society is a partner on the project, but it is owned and operated by Ne’rahten Developments Ltd. We have since updated the article to include this.