It is impossible to walk through Toronto in 2021 without being overwhelmed by the juxtaposition of garish mansions LARPing as British country homes and decrepit apartments renting for over $2,000 a month. The irrationality of housing under capitalism is not, however, a recent development. Already in 1937, the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR), the intellectual appendage of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF, the precursor to Canada’s social democratic New Democratic Party), condemned the gross wastefulness of the urban landscapes that the capitalist class had constructed.

The LSR saw that the splendor and the squalor of capitalist housing were related. It argued that:

An unrestrained system of profit-making enterprise is responsible not only for the arid wastes of city street and slum, rooming houses and “shack towns,” inadequate provision of open spaces, playgrounds, and community centers, but also for the vulgar ostentation or the mock-antique of many of our “high-class” residential districts, the crudities of our present civic architecture, the waste and graft of much of our public works development.