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<\/p>\nLISTEN | Fighting for housing as a human right and a place to call home:<\/p>\n
Ideas8:39Confronting ‘Housing Inc.’ | Meet the 2026 CBC Massey Lecturer<\/p>\n
In the midst of a worsening global housing crisis, our homes have been stripped of their essential humanity and treated like \u201ctoys\u201d for the world\u2019s biggest industry, says 2026 CBC Massey Lecturer Leilani Farha. <\/p>\n
\u201cHome is required for human existence and for life itself\u2026. It\u2019s essential to human dignity, to security,\u201d says Farha, who served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing from 2014 to 2020. <\/p>\n
\u201cHome is really everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
But over the last half-century, our homes have become something else: a commodity. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere are a whole bunch of actors \u2014 financial firms, pension funds, private equity firms, even governments \u2014 who view housing almost like a toy. Something to be played with, but with big monetary gains at the end,\u201d says Farha, global director of The Shift, an international human rights organization focused on housing, finance and climate. <\/p>\n
Her Massey Lectures are called Housing Inc.: A Global Takeover and Our Fight for Home. <\/p>\n
\u201cTogether, this alliance has turned our homes into an asset class, and quite frankly, the biggest business in the world,\u201d she told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe global value of residential real estate has reached about $287 trillion US \u2014 the largest store of wealth on earth,\u201d she writes in her lectures. <\/p>\n
\u201cMore than 10 times the value of all the gold ever mined, and more than twice the total of the world\u2019s gross domestic product.\u201d<\/p>\n
WATCH | Leilani Farha describes how the housing industry became big business:<\/p>\n
Your home is part of the world\u2019s most lucrative industry<\/p>\n
This fall, Leilani Farha will deliver her CBC Massey Lectures in five cities across Canada. She served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing and is the global director of The Shift.A new empire <\/p>\n
Housing Inc. describes this as a new empire \u2014 one driven by the same imperial logic of displacing people deemed inferior and turning their former homes into sites of wealth extraction.<\/p>\n
\u201cFinancial firms approach housing the way mining companies approach ore deposits, identifying valuable sites and moving in to extract maximum value. The existing residents are seen as obstacles to profit,\u201d she argues. <\/p>\n
Today, she points out, algorithms are increasingly used to identify what the industry terms \u201cundervalued assets.\u201d Often these are buildings where long-term tenants pay affordable rents, because they represent the biggest gaps between current and potential profits. <\/p>\n
Once those buildings are purchased by a financial firm, the existing tenants are displaced and the building is \u201crepositioned.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cThe language that they use is quite chilling, actually. They say they want to remove \u2018legacy tenants\u2019 and replace them with \u2018higher-quality tenants,\u2019\u201d she told Ayed. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe wealth extracted by financial firms flows to international shareholders whose earnings sit in offshore accounts, much like the empires of old that extracted goods and resources from their colonies to ship back to the \u2018mother country,\u2019\u201d she writes. <\/p>\n
Changing the national conversation about housing <\/p>\n
This fall, Farha will deliver her CBC Massey Lectures in five cities across Canada, following in the tradition of past lecturers such as Tanya Talaga, Margaret Atwood and Stephen Lewis. <\/p>\n
The book version of Leilani Farha’s lectures will be published by House of Anansi Press in September. <\/p>\n
Tickets for the five lectures go on sale in July <\/p>\n
Sept. 8, Koerner Hall, Toronto, ON <\/p>\n
Sept. 12, Neptune Theatre, Halifax, NS<\/p>\n
Oct. 1, Northern Arts and Cultural Centre, Yellowknife, NWT<\/p>\n
Oct. 22 and Oct. 23, York Theatre, Vancouver, BC<\/p>\n
Oct. 29, National Arts Centre, Ottawa, ON<\/p>\n
Farha told Ayed she hopes to spark conversations about more than just housing policy.<\/p>\n
\u201cHome has been turned into a power struggle, and it is very revealing of who counts in this world and who doesn’t,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n
She argues we need to focus on what human beings need from housing \u2014 not what investors want.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we can hear more from the people actually affected, I think that will naturally change the conversation,\u201d she told Ayed. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt’ll be less about metrics and return on investment and profitability, and it’ll be more about human existence, the desire for dignity, and for just a place to call home.\u201d <\/p>\n
Since 1965, CBC IDEAS has broadcast the Massey Lectures, exploring the ideas that make us who we are. The lectures are a partnership between CBC, House of Anansi Press and Massey College in the University of Toronto. For more, visit the archives<\/a>. <\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LISTEN | Fighting for housing as a human right and a place to call home: Ideas8:39Confronting ‘Housing Inc.’…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":723877,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,49,48],"class_list":["post-723876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=723876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/723877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}