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Across Canada we see the same crisis playing out. In Vancouver, poor and working people camp in tents while overseas investors leave condos empty. In Toronto, families in Parkdale receive eviction notices while luxury towers (with a few token “affordable” units) rise around them. In Halifax, students and seniors compete for the same scarce apartments. The developers call it growth. The two-faced politicians call it progress. Renters call it a fight for survival.

The roots of this crisis reach back decades. Beginning in the mid-1970s, manufacturers began shutting down factories across the country, chasing cheaper labour in oppressed and semi-colonized countries across the world. Hamilton lost most of its steel industry, Windsor lost auto plants, and Montreal lost its garment shops. Working-class neighbourhoods were emptied of jobs and hope. Small businessmen, middle-class professionals and skilled trades-men with access to mortgages fled on masse to the ‘burbs. Those left behind, disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and racialized migrant communities, were left in neighbourhoods starved of investment. Banks redlined them, landlords abandoned buildings, and social services were gutted.

Then capital returned. But not for the people who stayed.

By the 1990s, devalued post-industrial land looked cheap to developers. Young professionals, bored with suburban sprawl, sought vibrant, “authentic” urban life. Tech employees, finance bros, office workers and “entrepreneurs”  flooded into Toronto’s north Parkdale and Liberty Village, Vancouver’s Yaletown, and Montreal’s Plateau. They brought money. Rents climbed. Longtime tenants received eviction notices for renovations or “landlord’s own use”. Working-class communities were disintegrated and replaced with manufactured, commercialized yuppie precincts.

Provincial and municipal governments cleared the way for capital. Property tax breaks, zoning changes and development permits were geared towards those with money. Developers made campaign donations. Police cleared homeless encampments. The city was being remade for those who could pay. City councillors (even the “Leftist” ones) underprioritized actual affordability. They praised various isolated “co-op” schemes and advocated for “transit orien-ted” developments instead of actually freezing and decreasing rent!

Meanwhile, public housing was systematically demolished and/or privatized. Toronto’s Regent Park was torn down and rebuilt as “mixed-income”. Vancouver’s social housing stock crumbled while glass towers sprouted beside it. The State actively destroyed afford-able housing and scattered communities that might have resisted.

Then came 2008. America’s housing bubble burst, sending shock-waves around the world. In Canada, the crash was softened by public bailouts and other maneuvers by the Canadian bourgeoisie. The big banks survived and got creative.

In the aftermath, finance capital started coming for a new gold mine: renters. The now-notorious real estate investment trusts (REITs) began buying up everything: single-family homes, apartment towers and entire neighbourhoods. They raised rents across the board with algorithmic precision. They evicted tenants with armies of lawyers. Between 2015 and 2022, corporate ownership of rental housing became the norm. The “mom-and-pop” landlord became an en-dangered species and in their place: giant corporations with quarterly earnings reports and zero interest in poor and working-class people.

Working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods became arenas of struggle. REITs cut back on maintenance and jacked up rents. Many older buildings began to fall into disrepair. Tenants, spurred-on by the initiative of the most-outraged and most-class-conscious among them, organized. They formed various tenants’ unions, hold-ing meetings in church basements, libraries, union halls and coffee shops. They refused to pay, launching rent strikes that  lasted many months. Most often the landlord would eventually compromise and offer building improvements and rent forgiveness.

But overall the rent kept rising. And the strikes kept coming. At 119 Wade Avenue, tenants withheld rent for over a year! Each victory was very real, but also temporary. The REITs, their capitalist over-lords and their middle-managing henchmen regrouped. They filed applications. They waited tenants out. Some were bought out by larger REITs. The tenants’ victories were overshadowed by things getting worse overall. Rents relentlessly increased, year after year.

And it wasn’t just renters getting squeezed. Working people with mortgages started really being pinched too. Often referred to as “homeowners”, in actuality, their homes are owned by the banks. The same banks that bundled subprime mortgages and blew up the pre-2008 bubble, held millions of Canadians in debt bondage. Variable rates climbed. Families paid thousands every month just in interest. That money flowed directly to Bay Street and Wall Street, then onward to imperialist ventures abroad.

Because big Canadian capital doesn’t just exploit here. It plunders across the world. Canadian pension funds and investment trusts own housing in Chicago, London and Sydney. They extract rent from tenants everywhere. The profits from a family evicted in Parkdale might flow into a giant mine in Colombia or a pipeline in Nigeria.

Then came COVID and the ensuing 2020 Summer Rebellions. The people erupted into pockets of revolt and mass discontent, pissed off about: police brutality and systemic racism; the delayed, confusing and panicked government responses to the virus; and the actual physical, mental and financial impact of the pandemic itself. In an attempt to appease the revolting masses (in particular those with the least to lose), the capitalist State (temporarily) ramped up its welfare programs. Eviction moratoriums kept us inside. CERB kept us fed. Some wealthy renters fled the cities, briefly cooling markets. But by 2022, things rolled on. Landlords hiked up rents to “recoup losses.” Eviction courts reopened and processed tenants out by the thousands. In some cities, rents jumped more than 30% within two years! Wages crawled upward at half that pace (if that).

Homelessness exploded. Tens of thousands of people were pushed onto the street. Hundreds of thousands more were forced to live in their cars and overcrowded apartments. The capitalist governments responded not by constructing new affordable public housing, not by expropriating the parasitic real estate corporations, but by conducted violent sweeps. In BC, new laws empowered police to clear encampments. In Ontario, peoples’ defenders were shoved to the ground and tents were bulldozed in broad daylight. The State’s message was unmistakable: Property matters. People don’t.

So who wins? The list is short. Real estate developers, corporate landlords, REITs, and the big banks. All of which are run and controlled by the big capitalist class. They profit from scarcity, from displacement, from treating homes as assets instead of rights. And when it comes down to it, this system is backed by the capitalist State’s police, courts, and token “representative” politicians.

Through investment chains and shared corporate ownership, these capitalist entities at home are connected to Canadian imperialist escapades overseas. The same capital that evicts tenants in Toronto builds pipelines in Alberta, funds mining operations in Latin America and Africa, and military interventions in the Middle East (west Asia). This is why the imperialists (a faction of which make Canada their home) are the main enemies not only of working people in Canada, but of oppressed people the world over.

So when it comes down to it, the housing crisis isn’t a technical problem. It’s about ownership. We have the technical, creative and productive capacity to house everyone. But the tiny capitalist class owns the housing we all need. And they ultimately decide who lives where, and who simply doesn’t get stable shelter. They extract wealth from us with every rent cheque, every mortgage payment, and every renoviction. And as long as housing is private property, as long as our society is driven by the capitalist profit motive, there will always be people sleeping in tents while luxury condos sit empty.

The problem is that the commodification of housing will always lead to the concentration of the housing stock in the hands of a few. And these deranged monopolists, driven by their crazed quest for max profits, will always gouge ordinary people as much as possible.

The long-term solution isn’t more pseudo-“affordable” housing schemes. It isn’t half-ass government policies that never really address the root of the problem. It isn’t more charity shelters, tiny homes, or “respite sites”. The solution is taking housing out of the capitalist market entirely. This means seizing the properties of corporate landlords by any and all means necessary. This means working collectively to house everyone and distribute property based on peoples needs (duh!). This means giving everyone a say over their home, their ‘hood, and their country! This means develop-ing a democratic planned economy, where the housing stock is organized like any other vital public utility. This means freeing com-munities from displacement and disintegration. This means freeing working people from poverty and the fear of the first of the month.

A society that guarantees everyone a stable home is possible! But it requires taking power away from those who profit from sky-high rents and inaccessible housing. And it’s secured only by putting that power in the hands of poor and working people.

Housing for all!

All power to the people!

Working and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!