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Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada's Housing Crisis
By Gregor Craigie. 2024
DAISY audio (CD), DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Economics, Business and economics, Politics and government, Social issues
Human-narrated audio
An urgent and illuminating examination of the unrelenting housing crisis Canadians find ourselves facing, by Balsillie Prize finalist and CBC…
Radio host Gregor Craigie, Our Crumbling Foundation offers real-life solutions from around the world and hope for new housing innovation in the face of seemingly impossible obstacles.Canada is experiencing a housing shortage. Although house prices in major Canadian cities appear to have topped out in early 2023, new housing isn’t coming onto the market quickly enough. Rising interest rates have only tightened the pressure on buyers, and renters, too, as rising mortgage rates cost landlords more, which are passed along to tenants in rent increases. Even with the recent federal budget commitment to bring more housing online by 2030, there will still be a shortfall of 3.5 million homes by 2030.Gregor Craigie is a CBC journalist in Victoria, one of the highest-priced housing markets in the country. On his daily radio show On The Island he's been talking for over 15 years to local experts and to those across the country about housing. Craigie has travelled to many of the places he profiles in the book, and in his interviews with Canadians he presents the human face of the shortfall as he speaks with renters, owners and homeless people, exploring their varying predicaments and perspectives. He then shows, through comparable profiles of people across the globe, how other North American and international jurisdictions (Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Helsinki, Singapore, Ireland, to name a few) are housing their citizens better, faster and with determination—solutions that could be put into practice here.With passion, knowledge and vigour, Craigie explains how Canada reached this critical impasse and will convince those who may not yet recognize how badly our entire country is in need of change. Our Crumbling Foundation provides hope for finding our way out of the crisis by recommending a number of approaches at all levels of government. The prescription for how we’re going to house ourselves and do so equitably, requires not just a business solution, nor simply a social solution.
Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir
By Danny Ramadan. 2024
DAISY audio (CD), DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
LGBTQ+ biography, Biography, Social issues
Human-narrated audio
A queer Syrian refugee reckons with a life spent out of place."Writing this memoir is a betrayal." So begins this…
electrifying personal account from Danny Ramadan, a celebrated novelist who has long enjoyed the shield his fiction provides. Now, to tell the story of his life, he must revisit dark corners of his past he’d rather forget and unearth memories of a city he can no longer return to.Starting with his family’s humble beginnings in Damascus, he takes readers on an epic, border-crossing journey: to the city’s underground network of queer safe homes; to a clandestine party at a secluded villa in Cairo; through Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East, a reckless hoax that threatens the safety of Syria’s LGBTQ+ community, and a traumatic six-week imprisonment; to beaches and sunsets with friends in Beirut; to an arrival in Vancouver that’s not as smooth as it promised to be; and ultimately to a life of hard-won comfort and love.What emerges is a powerful refutation of the oversimplified refugee narrative—a book that holds space for joy alongside sorrow, for nuance and complicated ambivalences. Written with fearless intimacy, Crooked Teeth is a singular achievement in which a master storyteller learns that his greatest story is his own.