Overcrowded and mad as hell

Too many people in Nunavut know the problems caused by the housing crisis, but too few outside the territory are aware of the impact crowded houses have on people’s daily lives.

“Iglutaq (In my room): The Implications of Homelessness for Inuit,” is the first study to draw the link between mental health and social issues directly to crowded homes, and the results are alarming.

Frank Tester, a professor of social work at the University of British Columbia, recently wrapped up research in Cape Dorset that asked 91 people to describe their daily lives, and the problems they experience with overcrowded housing.

Tester worked with the Kinngait Harvest Society to produce a survey that would make sense to anyone asked to answer questions. They then hired seven young people, aged 17 to 24, to interview people in the community about the problems they face, and how those are related to housing.

“The relationship between overcrowding and people being angry and getting angry comes out all over the place,” Tester says.

About half of the people interviewed lived in overcrowded homes, in the worst case, with 12 other people in a two-bedroom home.

Asked what kind of personal and social problems each of the interviewees faced, the number one response, from 26 percent, said “people being angry.” Seventeen percent suggested drug use and 15 per cent said depression. Only five percent said alcohol.

Anger again topped the list when people were asked what kind of personal problems could be helped if there were fewer people in their homes — 30 percent said “people being angry,” 20 percent said “problems with school,” 17 percent said “depression” and 15 percent said “violence.”

Many of the people interviewed had so many people in their homes that they occasionally ran out of water or filled their sewage tank before the trucked services could keep up with the demand. This was documented as another source of anger and frustration.

“People in the South just don’t understand this,” Tester said.

Maata Parr, 24, was studying math and science at Nunavut Arctic College when she was hired to do some of the interviews.

She said most of the people she interviewed were happy to take part, but some did express frustration as they described their living situation.

“Many people are on waiting lists for houses,” Parr says. “They wait two to three years sometimes.”

In the interviews, many people revealed that they lack the supplies to get on the land.

Men said this mainly made them feel bored, but also depressed and angry. Women also said they were bored, but introduced a new emotion: anxiety. This could be anxiety of not having a place to get away, or, chillingly, of living in a home with a bored and depressed man who can’t go on the land to let off steam.

That anxiety could be related to another problem — a shortage of public places where people can go to get away from home life.

A majority of children went to a friend or relative’s home when there was trouble at home — but almost as many children said they didn’t go anywhere.

For Tester, this is a “huge safety issue.”

The violence is certainly happening. At one point last year, Tester said, the community was evacuating, on average, one woman every week to the women’s shelter in Iqaluit.

A shortage of money for hunting supplies means a shortage of country food. Hunger came up several times in the research — mainly in a section of questions about the state of appliances, which are frequently sold in order to buy food.

The research also found that people can’t sleep, keep the house clean, or do homework in crowded homes. This, to Parr and to some of the people she interviewed, was obvious.

But other findings were less so.

”The number of people who said overcrowding makes them depressed surprised me,” said Tester, who has done some previous research on the high suicide rate among Inuit.

Tester would like to see the research used to link health and social costs into the economic case for new housing.

“The social costs of this are ridiculous,” he says.

Copies of the report have been sent to several Inuit organizations and Nunavut and federal politicians.