The Housing Crisis Is Class War
The Housing Crisis Is Class War
A new book on the housing crisis in Canada poses the idea that the housing crisis is simply a result of the housing market working in exactly the way it was designed. To break this paradigm, the tenant class must organize and build political power.
He draws parallels between exploitative labor relations and the exploitative rental market to describe how property-owning landlords amass wealth on the backs of tenants — all thanks to government complicity dating back to the dispossession of indigenous lands and creation of property rights.
He then uses historical and contemporary tenant organizing stories — alongside his own professional and lived experiences as a political economist, policy researcher, and child of turbulent 1980s Brazil — to argue that the only solution is a struggle: the tenant class must organize to build political power and demand a more equitable, regulated, and largely nonmarket housing system.