Massey Lectures series talks corporate ‘invasion’ of housing in Halifax

The CBC Massey Lectures came to Halifax with Leilani Farha, a lawyer and housing expert, who spoke about the corporatization of housing on Sept. 12.

Halifax was the second stop of Farha’s five-city lecture series, titled Housing, Inc.: A Global Takeover and Our Fight for Home.

Farha’s daughter goes to Dalhousie University, and she said the family connection and severity of Halifax’s housing crisis made the city an important stop for her.

“To deliver this particular lecture — really going into the heart of the financialization of housing and its mechanics — just felt right to do here in Halifax,” she says. “Halifax is at the centre of the housing crisis storm.”

The Massey Lectures are one of Canada’s most acclaimed lecture series, with a different prominent thinker presenting a five-lecture series each year. Past lecturers include Martin Luther King Jr. and Margaret Atwood.

Farha was previously the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing from 2014 to 2020. In 2020, she co-founded the Shift, an organization advocating for housing as a human right. She has also previously advocated to protect Halifax’s homeless encampments to then-Mayor Mike Savage.

Her organization is currently working on a Hidden Housing project in Halifax, which identifies vacant houses to refurbish.

To a packed Neptune Theatre audience, Farha presented Home Invasion, a lecture on how governments and businesses have corporatized the housing market, which pushes people out of communities and homes.

Farha’s five lectures are on the value and meaning of homes, the new global empire of the housing industry, and how the global housing shortage caused by corporations and governments presents a “crisis of humanity.”

During the Halifax lecture, Farha said the deregulatory measures of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 90s, the post-2008 financial crisis bailouts for businesses while homeowners defaulted on mortgages and the generous tax exemptions for corporate landlords all contributed to the current global housing crisis.

Farha also spoke on how the values behind neoliberalism and corporatization are the same ones that underpin imperialism and colonialism — including the genocide of Indigenous North Americans and Palestinians.

“People seemed really riled up in the Q-and-A,” says Farha. “People seemed pretty ready to fight the system that is trotting on so many.”

Farha says the corporatization of housing means landlords claim a financial responsibility to generate profit, but not a moral one to humanity. This leads to ever-increasing rents, evictions and the erosion of community and belonging.

Farha says a focus of her lectures and book is reaching young people. She says one result of the housing crisis is “the loss of the future” for young people, with their regular life development being stunted or blocked by housing unaffordability.

“People in their 50s and 60s should be fighting this,” says Farha. “But at the same time I want young people to be aware that the system is rigged against them, to know it and go into it eyes wide open,” she says.

“Then maybe together we can fight it back and reclaim home.”
The series is presented through Massey College at the University of Toronto; CBC, which will broadcast the lectures in November; and House of Anansi Press Inc., which sells the book version of the lectures.