This is the second episode of the five part Halal Housing Lab podcast series, exploring the various challenges and opportunities that impact housing affordability within the Islamic community in Edmonton, Alberta. To understand how we might innovate and improve future housing projects, we wanted to start with one of the foundational components of affordable housing: The built form.

Today, I’ll chat with three of our lab partners: servant of servants, Omar Yaqub of Islamic Family, housing architect Sherri Shorten of SAS Architecture, and architect and passionate citizen Shafraaz Kaba of Ask For A Better World to better understand some key challenges and factors of success for housing multigenerational Muslim families. In our explorations of housing options that don’t fit into traditional Canadian models, we’ve begun to understand what housing can look like for diverse cultural needs, and what it takes to make our vision of Halal Housing come to life.

Conventional financing models keeps many Muslims, as well as service organizations like Islamic Family, out of the affordable housing market. A central component to the Halal Housing Lab has been to identify how different models of affordable housing financing can be leveraged to support diverse world views, while working within the larger Canadian housing system. Financing is a critical component to the success of any housing development, and when the idea of money is inherent to cultural values that differ from the North American norm, it compounds the difficulty of addressing the growing shortage of affordable housing in Canadian cities. While challenging, learning from Islamic values towards money through the concept of Halal financing, has the potential to create more equitable and transparent financial systems for all.

How do we leverage civil society to design, build & sustain appropriate affordable housing for racialized and, multi-barriered communities?

Today, we’ll begin to explore the complexity of the challenges that impact housing affordability for newcomer and Muslim families in Edmonton, Alberta. This episode is the first installment of the Halal Housing Lab Series, with future episodes zooming in to the focus areas of built form, programming, financing, and lived experience that will influence the lab process.

What would housing look like if community, hospitality, and beauty were at the forefront? These things are sometimes experienced in housing but rarely priorities in affordable housing, often neglected in lieu of more units or smaller footprints - which doesn’t align with Islamic values, or supporting communities to flourish. 

Community resilience is the sustained ability of communities to withstand, adapt to, and recover from adverse change, to come back stronger than ever. Today, I’ll chat with three of our lab partners: Islamic Family’s Programs Director, Lena Awwad, architect and passionate citizen Shafraaz Kaba of Ask For A Better World, and servant of servants, Omar Yaqub of Islamic Family to better understand community resiliency within the Muslim community, and the impacts of resiliency on affordable housing design.

To conclude the series, the fifth episode explores the expert voice of Muslims with lived experience in affordable housing developments. Without including individuals with lived experience in the design process, it creates an unbalanced approach to ending Canada’s affordable housing crisis.

In this episode, we dive into a great conversation co-produced by our Lab partner Hussain Khan of Islamic Family, in conversation with Howaida Hassan, to better understand the lived experience of affordable housing in the Muslim community. Howaida Hassan is a Director of Urban Growth and Open Space with the City of Edmonton, as well as a Board member of Islamic Family. Howaida is interested in the cross-section of city building, urban mobility and equity and how it shapes our cities. A big part of her career and how she thinks about equitable and accessible cityscapes, is through her experiences of living in affordable housing with her family for the first ten years of her life.