Rescuing Reality | MacLeans Magazine on the Renters Revolt

For some time I’ve been away from this blog – not because there wasn’t enough to write about, but because there is too much. It’s all you can do to keep up with what’s happening, let alone say something about it.

But here is something that I can’t pass by. McLeans magazine, Canada’s version of the USA’s Atlantic, has just published an article describing tenants who are being pushed to the wall by rising rents. They focus on Toronto, but do look across Canada, and it appears to be happening everywhere, not just in Canada but in much of the world.

As someone who was driven out of Toronto by this after living there for six decades, I’m deeply moved by the plight of these tenants. They are simply banding together and refusing to pay their rent. It’s an act of desperation, for the laws are almost all stacked against them.

I can’t review it all here, but I want to point out a couple of things in the MacLeans article. For example:

Over the past 20 years, new kinds of landlords—individual investors on the one hand, and large corporate players on the other—have increasingly turned Canada’s rental housing into a financial asset first and foremost. That’s fuelled faster rent increases, more precarious living situations, and more potential for conflict.

Does everyone understand this? Not content with turning almost everything else into a profit-making machine, they’ve done it to housing too. Condos as well as rentals are built now almost solely for the profit. Around the world now many of them remain vacant because it suits the owners to use them as nothing more than chips in a casino, holding them while the price rises. They can’t be bothered with the time-consuming business of renting them out. To drive this home, here is another quote:

In 2022, University of Waterloo planning professor Martine August prepared an unsparing report for the Canadian Human Rights Commission making exactly this point. “Rental apartments are treated as assets for financial investment and managed to generate maximum profits for investors,” she wrote. “This trend is intensifying hardship for renters.”

And there is this:

In his new book, The Tenant Class, political economist Ricardo Tranjan argues that for Canada’s property owners, the housing crisis is no crisis at all. The worse it gets, the more money they make.

MacLeans says the origin of all this goes back to the 1980s, when “when construction of purpose-built rental housing dropped off a cliff.” Yes it more or less began with the election of Ronald Reagan in the USA, bringing with him this new idea that only big business has the know-how to run a country. You would think the chaos that has been gradually building since the financial collapse of 2008-2009 would have taught people other-wise, but there is little sign that voters in democratic countries understand that a major change in this is necessary.

There is much more in the article. You meet these tenants individually and feel their struggle. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to appreciate what is really happening to us. Here is the link:

MacLeans /rentersrevolt