There’s no great mystique to housing people,” Judy Graves told me one sunny afternoon in March. We were walking through Stanley Park, and Graves was showing me the places she used to frequent during overnight walks to learn from people sleeping on the street. Those walks, initiated by simple curiosity, became a symbol of Graves’ unfussy, straightforward approach to understanding and finding solutions for homelessness, a social problem that, for many, is mired in endless complexity. But Graves didn’t see it that way. Ending homelessness is probably the easiest problem of all the problems facing cities to solve, she said. To her, the solution is simple housing that affords personal privacy and dignity. The Solutions Society tracked some of that progress. Former The Solutions housing reporter Monte Paulsen wrote numerous series exploring solutions to Vancouver’s housing crisis, a crisis at the time most visible on the city’s streets. People used to warn us 40 years ago about Vancouver becoming an executive city. It was gentrifying like mad. And it’s come to pass,” he says. “It’s the planning culture and the development culture that we’ve had that have allowed it to come to pass. Their efforts at social engineering have really succeeded.”