Idea could solve on-reserve housing shortage

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Dan McGinnis has a dream. If he can make it come true, a lot of other Native people will benefit.

McGinnis, 40, and his wife, Karren Shouting and three other southern Alberta Blood reserve residents make up the total current membership of the Aboriginal Homeowners Association, a not-for-profit group dedicated to creating an industry that will produce low cost, high quality homes on First Nation territories.

McGinnis' partner, Pat Eagle Tail Feathers, has his council's blessing to harvest logs up on the slopes of the Rocky Mountain foothills located on the Blood reserve, the largest in the country by land mass. They're using some of those logs as the supporting beams of the first home the association will build.

There's a story behind that. The first home will be tiny, a 540 square foot, two level hut on the rolling prairie a few minutes' drive south of the Trans Canada Highway just west of Lethbridge.

They're building that little house a stone's throw away from the foundation of a much larger 3,400 square foot post and beam constructed home with four bedrooms, three bathrooms and vaulted ceilings. Once the smaller structure is completed, they'll qualify for an infrastructure grant that will help them get their real home under construction.

"The band made a grant available to its members for infrastructure: roads, sewer, water, power, gas. It was supposed to be $20,000," McGinnis said.

But council's policy is that any grant recipients must already have a house built.

"I said, 'Fine, I'll build a 20 by 20 and when it's built, I want my grant,'" he said.

The project will eventually, if all works out, provide a permanent home for McGinnis, his wife and their three children, ages 11 to 14, that far exceeds the standards of current Indian Affairs housing.

The association has no assets to speak of, although some local media coverage has attracted the attention of supporters on and off the reserve who've helped with small donations of material and loaned equipment. Having no money is a problem, but it would be a much bigger problem if they were trying to build a conventional house in the usual way. Instead, they're using the logs that survive the forest fires that burn in British Columbia each year-logs they get for free-and another commodity that's not exactly in short supply on the Prairies, straw bales. Free wood for the frame, free straw for the walls and providing most of the labor yourself cuts the costs down considerably. It's still a struggle to proceed with little or no cash; they were hoping to have the smaller house erected before the winter set in and didn't make it due to mechanical breakdowns.

The project started three years ago when Eagle Tail Feathers, who owns a log skidder, asked McGinnis, an electronics engineering technologist who graduated at age 28 from the DeVry Institute of Technology, for some business advice.

"He's got the access to the raw materials. There's a dire need for something here. I just put the two together. If we can take the raw materials and build something that's got some value, then we should be able to make money," McGinnis said. "The thing that's needed the most is housing. In order to build a stick frame house you've got to have a lumber mill and all that sort of good jazz. And well, we don't have that."

They took on some decorative log projects to get experience working in construction and were successful there.

"My whole focus since I've been down here has been to try and get a business going and try to employ some people and contribute to this community in some way. To that end, that was the whole reason I went back to school," McGinnis said. He's a member of the northern Alberta Saddle Lake First Nation and now lives in his wife's community. "I want to help my community. My community needs infrastructure; my community needs technology. I went back to school so I could apply what I learned and help my community. And isn't that what we'reall supposed to do?"

Having to go through the charade of building the mini house to get the grant for the real project is not the only bureaucratic hoop they've had to jump through.

"When we went to go see CMHC [Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation], they immediately referred us back to Indian Affairs. And when we went to see Indian Affairs, they referred us back to CMHC," he said.

But work continues on the project, with occasional unplanned interruptions for weather or mechanical problems.

"If we had money, we wouldn't have these problems," he said. "It doesn't have to be this way. With the ease of construction, there's no reason in the world why we couldn't be building hundreds of homes every year and employing hundreds of people to do it. You don't need to have a degree to chuck bales."

He believes he can build his dream house for about $40,000, far below current housing costs. And he is convinced he can train others to do the same thing, both inside and outside his community.

"What really struck me was a television program I watched years ago where there were these 15 Mexican women that got together and built each other a house," he said. "They were women with children and no husbands but they banded together and they collected materials and they started building. In the end, each family had a house of their own. I thought, 'That's a great thing. And if they can do it, I can do it.'"

He wonders, since so many government reports lament the horrid state of First Nation housing, why no one else has looked at alternative forms of construction.

"I can't understand why either this or any other innovative way to build homes hasn't been explored. I think maybe people are just afraid or else there's a vested interest in keeping it this way. That's what I assume," he said.

How bad is the housing situation on the Blood reserve?

"All we hear is rumors," Dan McGinnis said. "The rumor two years ago was around 1,800 people. My brother-in-law' been waiting 20 years now. He applies every year."

McGinnis refuses to wait 20 years to get a house the usual way. He's living with his in-laws right now and is in a hurry to get his family into their own home.

"I can't understand why we're running into the roadblocks we are. I mean, we can build for less. You'll get a better quality house, I would think, for less of a price and that would save the reserve money," he said.

He wants the word to get out that he's attempting to start this revolution in First Nation housing. If he can prove the validity of his ideas by successfully completing his own house, he expects to attract interest from many other communities.

"The whole idea behind the association was to create a vehicle that we could export to other communities verbatim. This is how we do it and we want to bring it to your reserve and help you out as well," he said.