Adequate housing is not only having a roof over one’s head but living in security, peace, and dignity – it is a fundamental human right, as initially enshrined in article 25.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To truly be adequate, housing must provide legal security of tenure, be in a suitable location with access to essential services (water, energy, sanitation), and be affordable, habitable, and accessible. Lastly, housing must also be culturally adequate – meaning that it enables, incorporates, and reflects cultural identity, practices, and ways of living (UN-Habitat, 2009).
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation uses core housing need, defined as housing that is unsuitable, inadequate, or unaffordable, as a broad indicator of housing quality in the country. In 2021, core housing need among Indigenous households far exceeded the national average of 7.7% – reaching 16.9% in the Northwest Territories, 18% in Yukon, and 45.9% in Nunavut. However, this issue is not solely a Canadian one. If one looks beyond Canada, the pattern is consistent across circumpolar regions such as Greenland and Alaska, where similar housing failures are documented even though they are governed differently. Therefore, the question is, if the systems differ remarkably, why does the outcome look so similar?
The easiest answer is distance. Circumpolar communities are remote and often lack the materials needed for modern construction. These distances drive up staggering transportation, labour, and materials costs. A sheet of plywood that costs $12 in Anchorage, Alaska, can cost up to $140 in the state’s remote northernmost villages (Coloruck, 2026). These costs are greatly exacerbated by the acceleration of housing deterioration due to climate change. In some communities in Alaska, permafrost thaw has created six-foot gaps beneath homes originally built with one foot of clearance (Coloruck, 2026). In general, thaw can mean loss of bearing capacity, thereby rendering infrastructure and entire buildings unsafe (Hjort et al., 2018; Streletskiy et al., 2023), and the thaw-freeze cycles result in unsafe water systems, mold issues, and respiratory health problems (Canadian Climate Institute, 2021; Ranaweera and Varvares, 2025). In each of these nations, housing policy is largely defined in more southern areas and then applied to remote northern communities. This shows a gap: Policy designed in the South applied in the North, breaks down in specific, material ways.
But distance alone doesn’t fully explain the pattern of housing crises across arctic and subarctic communities, it is also a question of who controls the process and whose realities are taken into account. In a lot of remote communities, the current housing stock is a legacy of colonial-era construction. For example, in Greenland, post-WWII housing was designed by architects in Copenhagen and shipped north as pre-fabricated kits. Designed for Danish family sizes and needs, it fails to reflect the widely lived realities of multi-generational Indigenous households. The example here is one of those cases where these houses provided insufficient rooms and no space for the storage of hunting equipment or preparation of country food (Arnfjord, 2026).
Therefore, communities with meaningful ownership over the design, financing, and governance of their housing options tend to produce housing that fits their needs. Communities where those decisions are made for them or where their participation is limited tend to reproduce the same mismatches regardless of funding or expertise. The real variable isn’t peripherality itself. It’s self-determination, and peripheral regions just happen to be where its absence is most starkly felt.
As stated in Article 21 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), Indigenous peoples have the right to improve their economic and social conditions, including in the area of housing. Yet, when looking at Northern housing, this right is not yet realized. Northern housing policy historically aimed to extend the welfare state and assimilate Indigenous peoples through social programming. This has resulted in territorial housing corporations that today administer significant shares of public housing. Especially in the Canadian territories of Nunavut (46% of dwellings), the Northwest Territories (14%), and the Yukon (5%), the numbers are relatively high. While smaller communities depend heavily on subsidized housing and cities like Iqaluit rely almost exclusively on it for affordable rentals, rising private market costs, real estate investment trust (REIT) dominance, and limited public units have created a severe low-income housing shortage in larger urban centres (Pottie-Sherman and Christensen, 2025). Yet, the most resilient housing solutions are the ones that are not only designed for local communities but also by them. Self-determination is therefore crucial in providing adequate housing to and with those communities. This self-determination means that communities have control over the design, construction, financing, governance, etc. of their housing. Frameworks such as the First Nations Principle of OCAP (Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession) reinforce this approach by ensuring that communities retain authority over their data, processes, and decision-making. Embedding these principles is essential to achieving culturally appropriate and sustainable housing outcomes. So, the housing crisis in the North is not primarily about money or technology, but rather a multilayered problem of control, agency, and decision-making power.
When communities get to be part of or lead the decision-making process, results look different. Aligning with Inuit ways of exchanging and passing down knowledge, storytelling can function as an effective participatory and decolonizing research and design method that redistributes power, recognizes emotion and context, and enables collective meaning-making. It not only serves as a tool for gathering data but is a relationship-based practice that creates a shared understanding and community ownership of knowledge (Wheeler & Bivens, 2021). Loginova et al. (2025) explore Indigenous-centered decision-making as a just means of ensuring Inuit rights to self-determination, emphasizing the importance of understanding internal dynamics within Indigenous contexts. According to Barnaby (2009), most Arctic communities reach decisions through consensus, including all perspectives, as well as relying on the past and learnings from history.
While geography, cost, climate, and distance remain relevant issues to be solved, current policies risk overlooking the more important and overarching variable that is key to addressing all of the others. Until that distinction between those who write policy and those who live with it is treated as the central problem, this Arctic housing crisis will continue to be misdiagnosed, and the solutions offered will keep targeting the outcomes rather than the root cause.
Webinar References:
Arnfjord, S. (2026, February 25). Adequate and resilient housing for Northern and Arctic climates [Webinar presentation]. Urban North Webinar Series (Second Webinar). UN-Habitat Canada.
Coloruck, C. (2026, February 25). Adequate and resilient housing for Northern and Arctic climates [Webinar presentation]. Urban North Webinar Series (Second Webinar). UN-Habitat Canada.
Connect with the Author
Leonie Kralinger is an urban planner and researcher with a background in architecture. Her work explores urban justice, sustainable urban development, and the social dimensions of spatial transformation, with a particular interest in how planning can foster more inclusive, sustainable, and resilient communities. She holds degrees in Architecture and in Sustainable Urban Planning and Design from the University of Innsbruck and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Architecture at the University of Innsbruck.
Bryn DeVries is a public policy analyst specializing in disaster management. Through her research, DeVries explores the intersections of urban planning, climate adaptation, and peace building to develop strategies for communities to remake their urban spaces in ways that center social cohesion and sustainability. She holds degrees in international development and social work.