Jessica Barrett is an award-winning journalist and author of No Place Like Home: The Missing Key To Our Housing Crisis. Jessica got her start as a community newspaper reporter in Vancouver, B.C., where she fell in love with covering municipal issues and urban affairs. Over the years she worked her way up to reporting for the Vancouver Sun, B.C. Business Magazine and eventually became Senior Editor of Vancouver Magazine. Jessica has also appeared regularly as a columnist in print and on the radio. Her writing has won multiple awards, including Postmedia’s prestigious Michelle Lang Fellowship and the Jack Webster Foundation’s City Mike award for her columns about Vancouver’s housing affordability crisis.
Jessica now lives in Calgary, where she continues to write and think about how to bring about systemic change for a more just, joyful and functional society. When not writing, Jessica spends her time gardening, devouring podcasts and attempting to wrangle her young son into bed.
Topics:
- Urban Planning and Housing Policy
- Community Connections and social isolation
- Writing and Writing Craft
Talks
Housing Vs. Home
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 a more 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 this talk, Jessica introduces audiences to her research on the fundamental elements of home and explores how these elements are, or are not, prioritized in our current housing system. She then goes on to present examples from around the world and locally on how to get back to the fundamentals of home, and produce better, more affordable housing for all.
C is for Community
When it comes to our housing crisis, most of the proposed solutions come from one of two places: the market, or the government. Both are problematic, though for different reasons. Private developers don’t always build homes that people can afford — or homes that people want. And governments are famously fickle. All it takes is a shift in political ideologies or a change in ruling parties to decimate systems and organizations that rely on public funding. But there is a third option. A vast middle ground between public and private on which we can build housing that is affordable, desirable and socially and environmentally sustainable. And there is an overlooked stakeholder group that is inherently motivated and perfectly capable of leading this charge. Us. In this talk, Jessica introduces audiences to the concept of Community-Led housing, offering examples from all over Canada, and all over the world, that show how the housing crisis can be solved by regular people coming together in pursuit of a better way to live.
The Hidden Power of Neighbourliness
Canadians spend significantly less time with our neighbours now than we did just a few decades ago. In the era of Amazon and Instacart, our lack of neighbourly connections might seem a little sad, but largely inconsequential to our lives—we no longer need our neighbours to provide that proverbial cup of sugar. But we do need our neighbours, and we need them more than ever. In this talk, Jessica dives into the astounding research on the role neighbourliness plays in our health, safety and social fabric, explaining how reclaiming neighbourliness is one of the biggest untapped solutions to some of most pressing issues of our time — everything from the loneliness epidemic, to political polarization, to surviving climate change. She then points the way toward some surprising, and surprisingly simple, actions we can take to nurture neighbourliness at every level of our lives, from the personal to political.
She can be found on Instagram at @thewrightlight
Selected works:
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/