by Espoir Manirambona
Homelessness sucks. Imagine for a minute that you didn’t have a place to call home. You didn’t have a warm place to go to on a cold night. You’re struggling to find a place to sleep or even just rest. The police and other unsavory characters regularly harass you and tell you to “get lost.” People routinely look down on you because of the way you’re dressed. You can’t shower anywhere so you don’t smell like other people expect you to.
This is the life of many of our fellow citizens. Even on a warm-ish night, being homeless is a challenge but in a place like Canada — with below 0 temperatures — it’s a death sentence.
Countless Canadians have called for an end to homelessness over the decades but after 150 years, we’ve yet to ensure a healthy home for all. What is the root of this failure? Why can’t we seem to end homelessness? What are the systemic forces that have been overlooked, preventing us from solving this issue?
On Nov. 18, 2016, housing activists gathered in Toronto to demand the Trudeau Liberals fulfill their campaign promise to introduce a National Housing Strategy. This national day of action was organized by the Right to Housing Coalition, an alliance of community organizations.
In the past, this coalition brought federal and provincial governments to court arguing their failure to address Canada’s homelessness crisis is a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and international law.
Indeed, Canada has ratified a number of binding UN agreements that recognize the right to housing such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. These documents have been ratified by Canadian institutions and are therefore binding.
The coalition is calling for more public investment to guarantee everyone access to housing, especially more money for social and cooperative housing, which are by far the most affordable.
While calling for affordable housing is important, we need to remain mindful of what that means. Affordability essentially means cheaper, ensuring that rents are low enough that people earning low or no income can pay for them.
There is an assumption that everyone has money, however little. The truth is, many people are moneyless. Many homeless people don’t have any money at all, or if they do, it is simply not enough to cover all expenses for basic goods.
A guaranteed income would make sure that people have money for housing. But first, perhaps we should ask, why do we need to pay anything for housing? If housing is a right, not a commodity, why is it being bought and sold like one?
Before colonialism was established in Canada in the 17th century, land was shared collectively by different First Nations. The concept of rent, property and even money was foreign to Canada’s Indigenous peoples. When the white man came and introduced these liberal concepts, the Indigenous peoples had a hard time understanding these fundamentally individualistic values. As such, rent is merely a legacy of colonialism.
The settlers who came here brought with them ideas of private property and the tenant-landlord relationship. In Europe, feudalism had dominated economic relations for many generations. The Crown owned the land and lords managed it on behalf of the monarchy. Peasants, the vast majority of people, were landless and forced to work for the landlords to survive. In exchange for relative protection, the peasant tenants were forced to pay rent with whatever means they could. This rent-seeking was so outrageous that the landless peasant class in France demanded an end to this oppressive system. These events culminated in the French Revolution, a process which is still ongoing.
The merchants took advantage of the social upheaval and ironically became the bourgeoisie of the new system. Capitalism, while doing away with some elements of feudalism, maintained this tenant-landlord relationship and the source of its power: rent. Landlords are, in many ways, the original capitalists.
Today, large sums of money are transferred each month from tenants to landlords in the form of rent. Often, the landlord does little work to maintain the units to receive this rent. Collecting rent is imposed through fear; if the tenant does not pay, they are evicted through the use of state-sanctioned force. The capitalist state therefore maintains this exploitation and serves the interests of landlords.
Reform-oriented Liberals in the post-war welfare state invested in social and cooperative housing. This was due to the New Deal climate favouring public investments, strong labour and social movements and international pressure from state capitalist regimes like the Soviet Union that did provide free housing and other basic goods. The subsequent rise of neoliberalism (trickle-down economics) led to social spending cuts, especially for housing.
The Chrétien/Martin governments made huge cuts to investments in social housing, which lead to a shortage of units, long wait lists, higher rents and lower quality. These same governments gave hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy; wealth was quickly transferred from the masses to the elite.
Homelessness is a choice. Capitalist governments choose to ignore their legal obligations so they can support their financial backers at the expense of the rest of us. The lack of social housing affects everyone. There is less public housing available, meaning that more people are forced to rely on the private housing market. This increase in demand for private housing increases the price and makes housing more expensive for everyone.
In addition, private housing markets are highly unstable as demonstrated by the 2007/08 US subprime mortgage crisis which led to widespread foreclosures. Even in good times, speculation and the profit motive causes gentrification, which turns working-class neighbourhoods into havens for the rich. Markets favour those with money; the poor lose out and are subsequently evicted.
Free housing that’s accessible to all is the only way to truly guarantee the right to housing. Everyone that needs a home can get it regardless of whether they have a paying job, are on social assistance or have no money at all. This process of decommodification would mean that housing becomes a public good; the costs are covered through public finance. Instead of spending billions on war, we can use that money to make sure everyone has a home. Instead of investing in police brutality, we can divest and put those resources into social housing, ensuring everyone has some form of stability, thus reducing crime as a result.
The Government of Libya provided free housing to its citizens before the country was bombed by NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) members, including Canada. If a much poorer country like Libya was able to do it, then surely we can, too. We can examine ways to cut costs, reduce high salaries in the public housing sector and focus on building smaller, environmentally friendly homes that require fewer resources and labour. The next step would be teaching and empowering people to build their own homes, learning from Indigenous people who’ve been doing this since antiquity.
Housing activists need to remain fearless and call for free housing. As long as we put a price on housing, those with money will get it and those without won’t. It’s really that simple. All that is required is the will to be bold. While I’m an eternal optimist, the Liberal Party as a whole is too tied to big business and the wealthy to be expected to introduce free housing. The Party has a tendency to support public-private partnerships that only help to perpetuate the capitalist system — the very system that creates homelessness in the first place.
This article first appeared in the Leveller Vol. 9, No. 4 (January/February 2017).
