No Place Like Home: The Missing Key to Our Housing Crisis

From award-winning journalist Jessica Barrett, an honest and urgent look at our housing crisis and lessons from around the world that will make better homes for all Canadians.

After living in Vancouver for her entire adult life, Jessica Barrett packed up her apartment, quit her dream job as a magazine editor, and headed for Calgary in search of an affordable place to call home. In the years since Barrett was priced out of Vancouver, the issue of housing affordability has become a national crisis, fanning the flames of social inequality and setting us up for financial ruin. But our obsession with rising housing prices obscures a more complex and pressing issue: we have lost our reverence for and our understanding of home.

In No Place Like Home, Barrett dives behind the headlines and statistics of Canada’s housing crisis to examine how it has eaten away at our psyches by undermining our human needs for belonging, connection, and stability. Through a mix of powerful memoir and rigorous journalism, she delivers an eye-opening portrait of our housing system while scouring the world for examples of how we might do things differently, pulling inspiration from the slum communities of Harare, Zimbabwe, the stately streets of Vienna, Austria, and the Cold-war era apartment blocks of West Berlin. In the process, Barrett forms a framework for solutions and the basis for achievable change. Her biggest discovery? We cannot solve our housing crisis until we first address our crisis of home.

JESSICA BARRETT is an award-winning journalist and writer. She has reported for the Vancouver Sun, BC Business Magazine, and was Senior Editor of Vancouver Magazine. Jessica’s writing has won multiple awards, including Postmedia’s prestigious Michele Lang Fellowship. She is one of the youngest people ever to be awarded the Jack Webster Foundation’s City Mike award for her columns about Vancouver’s housing affordability crisis. Jessica lives in Calgary.