Hope, Imagination, and the Question of Home

September 11, 2026

Today feels like a new beginning in more than one sense. Rosh Hashanah begins tonight. Ethiopian and Eritrean New Year falls on September 11, as does Nayrouz, the Coptic New Year. These traditions have different roots, but all are tied to the seasonal logic of harvest, light, and starting over. My own kids started a new school year this week: new classrooms, new routines, and that familiar feeling of beginning again.

The season itself seems to be asking everyone to begin again.

I started the day with my usual list: things to arrange, reply to, attend, organize, worry about, and carry for someone else. Somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped and asked myself what today actually meant.

It is Friday. Sabbath is coming. It is also Jumu’ah, and for many Christians, Sunday carries a similar weight: time set aside to stop, worship, and reflect. Different calendars, perhaps, but a shared instinct to pull back from the week and look at your life.

But I am not sure how much room we really give ourselves to do that. We are expected to stay productive, available, and in motion. Rest begins to feel like something we have to justify.

These thoughts were already sitting with me when I went to hear Leilani Farha’s lecture at Toronto Metropolitan University, Housing, Inc.: A Global Takeover and Our Fight for Home. At one point, she said that she does not really have hope; she has imagination.

I sat with that for a while.

I was raised on hope. It has carried many people through hard years: raising children, caring for family, getting through uncertainty, and believing things might still turn out okay. But Farha made me wonder whether hope, left on its own, can become passive. We hope someone in power listens. We hope housing becomes more affordable. We hope things improve.

Imagination is a different demand. It asks us to picture something that does not yet exist, and then build toward it.

Housing is where the gap between those two things shows up most clearly. When a home is treated first as an investment and only second as a place to live, the damage can be traced in a straight line: rents climbing, people pushed out of neighbourhoods, evictions, overcrowding, and families choosing between rent and medication.

Underneath all of it is one question: do we think of housing as property, or as something closer to a right?

People without homes are too often talked about as a problem, a nuisance to be cleared, rather than as neighbours. But losing housing is rarely a story about bad individual choices or personal failure. It is what happens when there is nowhere affordable to land; when mental-health support is unavailable; when income does not meet the cost of living; and when the people and institutions someone once leaned on can no longer hold them.

No one chooses a tent or the street over a safe home because it is better. People end up there because the systems meant to keep them housed gave out.

This is part of why I do not think “housing crisis” is a big enough name for what is happening. Farha’s point that treating housing as an asset instead of protecting it as a right is also a crisis of democracy stayed with me. Democracy is not only elections and institutions. It is whether people have enough stability to participate in their own lives.

It is hard to raise a family, stay connected to community, plan for the future, or show up for anyone else when you do not know where you will be living in six months. When survival takes up all the space, there is little room left to feel, grieve, rest, heal, or grow. A democracy cannot be healthy when people are so consumed by the work of getting through the month that they are denied the stability, time, and emotional space to participate fully in their own lives.

That question does not stop at the edge of the city, either. War pushes people out of homes and countries. So can an eviction notice, or a rent increase that no one could reasonably plan for. These are not the same forms of displacement, and I do not want to flatten them into one experience. But they rhyme. Each raises a version of the same question: who gets to stay somewhere and build a life?

You can feel this instability at the grocery store, in a stack of unpaid bills, in rent arrears, or in a family that is one bad month away from losing its home. It does not land evenly. It falls hardest on people with the least cushion: renters, newcomers, seniors on fixed incomes, people with disabilities, and anyone already close to the edge.

The point is not only to keep one group from falling further. It is to build something in which no one is treated as expendable in the first place.

If you are in Toronto, Crisis in Our City is hosting Rev. Maggie Helwig on Tuesday, September 15, for a conversation called A Prophetic Voice. Helwig spent years alongside people living in the encampment at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields, and her book asks something close to the question that stayed with me after Farha’s talk: what do the people we treat as “a problem” show us about what our systems refuse to provide?

The event is free, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Carrot Green Roof, 348 Danforth Avenue. Registration is through Eventbrite. It is being filmed for a documentary, with an option to opt out of being on camera.

I keep coming back to that first pause of the day: Friday, the new year, and my own kids’ first week of school.

Maybe hope and imagination are not really in competition.

Hope is what tells us things can be different. Imagination is what makes us draw the picture instead of simply wishing for it. Hope alone can remain a wish forever, and imagination without hope may never get started.

Together, they become something more than a feeling. They become a commitment: to picture housing as a right, to treat people without homes as neighbours, and to protect the rest, worship, family time, and community that remind us why any of it matters.

So perhaps the question today is not only what I hope for. It is what I can picture: something that the way things currently work insists is unrealistic, but that basic dignity requires anyway.