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The Housing Crisis Is Class War

By
Sahar Raza

A new book on the housing crisis in Canada poses the idea that the housing crisis is simply a result of the housing market working in exactly the way it was designed. To break this paradigm, the tenant class must organize and build political power.

Tenants of a low-rent apartment in northwest Toronto at 1570 Lawrence West are on edge, after recieving N13 notices from their new landlord -- a company that recently issued a memo saying its intention was to vacate all units and bring in a new "demographi

Tenants of a low-rent apartment building in Toronto, Canada, protesting evictions, July 16, 2022. (Steve Russell / Toronto Star via Getty Images)

What if there is no housing crisis, but a housing market working exactly as designed?

Ricardo Tranjan’s The Tenant Class rests on this premise, effortlessly dismantling apolitical narratives of Canada’s housing system to reveal an intentionally obscured class struggle between exploited tenants and extractive landlords — most of whom wouldn’t have it any other way.

In this timely and refreshing manifesto, Tranjan takes aim at Canada’s structurally inequitable and increasingly deregulated rental market, which prevents, rather than promotes, housing security, affordability, and adequacy among tenants.

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