‘Housing crisis’ a product of class struggle – Winnipeg Free Press

There is a housing crisis! That seems to be the daily headline in mainstream media — that through the almighty market, we can’t seem to figure out how to ensure all Canadians have the means to safe, affordable and well-maintained housing. However could we deal with the homelessness, the rising house prices, the unfettered rent increases?

According to Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) researcher and scholar Ricardo Tranjan, the so-called housing crisis is a product of class struggle and one in which the solution is political, not technical. In The Tenant Class, a small volume that packs a Marxist punch, Tranjan argues that since the arrival of settlers in what we now call Canada, there has been a capitalistic urge and desire to remove people from the land and exploit them.

Beginning with Indigenous peoples and now the working class, Canada has a dubious tradition of creating a housing system tilted in favour of large commercial landlords. “A housing system that serves all but one group is not in a state of crisis; it is one based on structural inequality and economic exploitation,” Tranjan argues. Furthermore, he posits that “Canada’s ‘housing crisis’ is a permanent state of affairs that harms people in, or in need of, rental housing; roughly one-third of the country’s households.”

For Tranjan, the non-crisis is a historic attack on workers where “the purpose of the rental market is not to ensure the highest possible number of families is securely housed.” Rather, “the purpose of the rental market is to extract income from tenants….”

Given his counter-narrative to that of landlords and mainstream journalists, Tranjan plunges the reader into a historical deep dive into how tenants have resisted the ravenous and bottomless appetites of corporate and elitist landlords for the past 400 years in this country. From P.E.I., Nova Scotia, Montreal and Vancouver, Tranjan highlights critical moments when tenants have galvanized their struggle and power to push back against those that control land and the political landscape.

Tranjan also highlights the political erasure that has transpired at the expense of tenants in return for huge profits. Taking a Gramscian stance, Tranjan suggests that the tenant is the subaltern — a class that perpetually has its history taken away from itself in exchange for narratives that portray Canada as a benign country led by well-meaning prime ministers.

But, as he argues, “this history is largely based on the accounts of those who are presented as prominent historical figures.” The voices of tenants and the working class have been left out and more intentionally erased from the history of housing in Canada.

The moral of the story is that “there is no housing crisis, just good old landlords squeezing high rents from tenants” for high profits. Tranjan challenges the reader to pick a side in this struggle.

On the one side is where the status quo is maintained — where tenants are stigmatized and left to the margins and where corporate landlords rake in unabashed profits.