The peoples of Canada have been confronted with a long-term and unresolved housing crisis, and North Hastings, Ontario, faces an intensified housing crisis in the form of increasing homelessness, precarious housing, so-called couch-surfing, and dramatic house price inflation. Most proposed solutions to this crisis treat the problems of a lack of affordable housing as a mere ‘market failure’ to produce enough housing. Rarely addressed is the broad perspective in which we might ask why high-income countries like Canada continue to have increasing housing crises over the last forty years? In this session we will explore an ecological perspective of housing as part of a provisioning system which connects homes to land use, material supply chains, governance and funding institutions, and long-term well-being. We will reframe housing as an essential service within our economy and establish a firm ground for why markets should not be responsible for organizing all the housing within our societies, and what a different approach to housing as essential might look like in practical terms, from forestry to financing.