Disability & Housing, Part 1

Joeita Gupta:
I'm Joeita Gupta, and this is The Pulse.
Tenants and landlords, it's hard to think of two groups of people who need each other more, but like each other less. The media is rife with stories about housing, landlords and tenants, the lack of affordable housing, the slum Lord who doesn't make repairs and the tenant always behind on rent. These are some of the enduring images and ideas that underpin many of our discussions about housing and tenants. But there are other stories as well. Stories about tenant resistance, tenant organizers and activists pushing back against bad landlords and holding governments accountable. Underlying all the chatter about housing is a fundamental truth. Housing is a human right. Today we discuss the tenant class. It's time to put your finger on the pulse.
Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI-audio. I'm Joeita Gupta. Today I'm wearing a teal shirt with quarter sleeves and a round neck, and my hair is pulled back in a bun. I also have a pair of black headphones that go over my ear. It's probably not very visible to you because my hair is also black. I'm joining you from the AMI Accessible Media Studios in Toronto and it's shaping up to be a rainy day here in the city and has brought I think some welcome relief to all of us dealing with wildfires across the country. I hope you're staying safe and looking after yourselves and your loved ones. I know we often talk about housing being in a state of crisis as well across Canada. We've had numerous stories about housing. And here on The Pulse we intend to take a deeper look at the question of housing, tenants and landlords.
And so what we're going to be doing is over the next three weeks we'll have three experts joining us to give us their take on housing. What are some of the barriers? Where do they see the opportunities? And what are our solutions? We'll be spending a lot of time next week and the week after that having a discussion about disability and housing, but this week I wanted to have a discussion to foreground our three-part episode on disability and housing. I'm delighted to welcome to the show Economist Ricardo Tranjan. Ricardo is with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and he recently wrote a book, The Tenant Class.
Ricardo, I am so pleased and delighted to welcome you to the program. Thanks so much for being here.

Ricardo Tranjan:
Hello, and thanks for having me here.

Joeita Gupta:
When we talk about housing in Canadian media, Ricardo, we often hear the term used as a housing crisis in Canada. And yet in your book, in the very first paragraph, you say there is no such thing as a housing crisis. What do you mean by that?

Ricardo Tranjan:
Well, what I'm saying is that the housing crisis is not the correct way of talking about what we are seeing today. What we're seeing today is a rental market that is largely unregulated which allows landlords to continually increase their profit margin, that allows private investors to build wealth. Whereas on the other hand, you have tenants that are struggling, that are paying too much in rent, that are having a hard time securing a unit and never mind building long-term financial security.
And so when we talk about a crisis, we usually tend to think about something that it's new and unexpected that hit us by surprise, whereas this has been happening for a very long time. When we talk about a crisis, we usually think about something that negatively impacts everyone or most people, which is not the case here. This impacts mostly tenants and tenants only. And also when we talk about a crisis, we tend to assume that everyone is engaged or interested in finding a solution. And this is the part that I find most disconcerting, this assumption that because of that crisis, everyone wants to solve it when in fact there are segments of the population of the economy that don't want things to be any different and they are actively lobbying to keep the things exactly the way they are because they're benefiting tremendously from it. That's why I argue that housing crisis is not the right way to talk about this.

Joeita Gupta:
Well, the other thing we hear a lot in the news, and you can let me know if you have a quarrel with this, is an emphasis on affordable housing or the lack of affordable housing. Is it enough for us to talk about affordable housing or do we need to take the conversation further?

Ricardo Tranjan:
Yes, I do have a beef with the way we talk about the affordable housing because it just kind of like what does it even mean? Affordable to who? It is just this kind of plastic term that politicians throw around because no one would ever be against affordable housing. We cannot, again, assume that it's a solution that we all actively looking and engaged in delivering. Governments used to... Politicians, I mean, and governments too, used to be more clear about saying public housing, social housing, not for profit housing. I think that's a better term that communicates that where we want is to build more housing that will not have profit as part of the equation. What we want is to either increase through construction the size of all housing that is outside of the market, or we're going to acquire more housing that is currently in the private sector and bring it to the not-for-profit sector. I think that non-market housing is a much better term.

Joeita Gupta:
The other argument we hear a lot, and this is especially true for anyone who's taken an introductory economics classes, supply goes down, demand goes up, prices go through the roof, and that a lot of people argue is what's happening with housing. And their solution is that if you just build more housing, it's going to take the pressure off the housing market and of course, it's going to be private developers who build this housing for us. But the moment you introduce more supply in the housing market, it's going to help to address some of those shortages and allow tenants to have more options and maybe more affordable housing. How does that argument track with you, Ricardo? Do you think that if we just address the supply side of this, we would get around the housing problems that we're dealing with at the moment?

Ricardo Tranjan:
Yes. I also have a difficulty with that argument, and this is a sort of really complicated question because we do need more housing. As the Canadian population continues to grow in whichever way we're growing, we need to build more house that accommodates that population growth. We need more purpose-built rental units, buildings that are designed for tenant families, which we have stopped building by and large over the past 20 years or so depending on what city you're talking about.
So yes, we need to build more, but building is necessary but not sufficient. Just building anything anywhere and renting it at any cost will not solve the issue of providing housing to tenant families that is more fairly priceless. It takes other measures on top of that. It takes, again, increasing the supply for housing that is non-market housing. It takes the strengthening the rent controls so that the new units that come to the market come and remain at a stable rent levels.
So it is a self-serving argument often because the second part of the argument is that developers and landlords need less regulations and more incentives for governments because that's how the story go, right? "Well, we have a housing crisis."
"Okay, great. What's the solution?"
"More housing."
"Great." We built more housing, prices didn't go down. We built more house, prices didn't go down. We built more houses, prices didn't go down. "Oh, what should we do now?"
"Oh, we should build even more. But now this time, governments should remove the so-called red tape. They should remove regulations for developers. They should provide us more subsidies, more cheap loans, and then the house is going to be more affordable." And then we do that and it doesn't happen. So there's a self-serving argument that on the part of the industry that is ultimately they're trying to get even a more sweet deal for themselves, and that's problematic and ultimately won't help tenants.

Joeita Gupta:
The other measure, I'm surprised, you haven't really talked about is some kind of, it could be a national rent subsidy program. So what if we just target the income side of the equation and gave tenants more money to put towards their rent? Is that one way we could ensure that tenants are a little more secure in their homes?

Ricardo Tranjan:
It is a necessary measure. And in those programs that do exist right now, the rates are often inadequate and then don't match the real rent costs. So this is really important side of the equation, which is to make sure that the income of tenants, it's growing at an adequate pace and that any rent subsidy also is growing at an adequate pace. But it will never be adequate if we don't control profit on the other side, right? So we can just keeping pushing for increasing in rent subsidies and in rent supplements whereas on the other hand, landlords can just keep rising rents at whatever rate they decided to raise rents by. So it needs to be both sides. Otherwise, what we are doing is an enormous transfer of income from governments to landlords via tenants, right?

Joeita Gupta:
In your book, you talk about the tenant class, in fact that is the title of your book. I should have asked you this earlier, but just for those of us who are not up on our Karl Marx, why is it so fruitful for you to think about this in terms of the haves and the have-nots and to really start to think about tenants as a class?

Ricardo Tranjan:
I found it fruitful because in our current economic thinking and in the current economic discussions that we have around housing, we take power out of the equation. We take politics out of the equation, we take social conflict out of the equation. And we present this artificially clear picture of supply and demand. "This goes up and this goes down and there's the market mechanism." And we almost assume that it's a natural process that has natural laws behind it. And all we have, we can do is to adapt to it and to respond to the demands imposed by us, by the market, which is sort of the classic no classical economic thinking.
I think not only Marx, but other political economists were aware that land and housing are extremely contentious issues. There are the center of a lot of social conflict and political conflict. There's a lot of power conversations and dynamics that take place around housing and land. And it's, I think, unhelpful to ignore those conversations. Those, again, to ignore those dynamics, right? So I think that's one of the reasons why I go back to the classics. It is my attempt to bring power, politics, and social conflict which does it exist. We can't pretend it doesn't. It does exist. It's just whether or not we talk about it. And I think it's helpful to talk about it.

Joeita Gupta:
Ricardo, we've been talking about social conflict and power relationships. I can't help but wonder if in having a discussion as we are right now about landlords and tenants, if part of that conversation also includes a discussion about where indigenous people come into this. And thinking through Canada's role as a colonizing power and the dispossession of lands from indigenous people, as we go about establishing this tenant class that we've been speaking about today, what role does decolonization play in those efforts?

Ricardo Tranjan:
Absolutely, that's a key part of it. Housing is built on land. When we talk about land in so-called Canada, we're talking about land that it was colonized. We talked about people who were murdered in order for the colonizers to take over that land. It was talking about folks who continued to be forced into a simulation so that land can be used for whatever purposes. The government of Canada and the property-owning classes decides that is a priority. So it is part of the bringing power back to the conversation, right? It is part of bringing politics back to the conversation. Land and the housing that is built on it is at the center of a historical struggle and let's just talk about it openly and let's talk about what it means or in terms of our responses, what it means in terms of the ways we try to solve the so-called housing and crisis. I think that is the way forward. It is not pretending that this is just a technical solution.

Joeita Gupta:
I can't help but think back to a lot of the media that you did, especially during the pandemic when you had... Sorry. I can't help but think back to the pandemic, Ricardo, because you'd done a lot of media back then talking about a paper that you had put out, saying that according to your research, many tenants were living paycheck to paycheck. That most, if they lost their jobs, could not afford to pay more than one additional month's rent. And at that time, you and other housing activists had said, "Maybe it's time, considering the pandemic, to look at some sort of a rent forgiveness program across Canada. So many people had lost their jobs. So many people were struggling financially that now would be the moment to bring forward some sort of a rent forgiveness program."
And I also remember hearing at the time, the counterargument being put forward, which is, well, what happens to landlords? They have bills to pay as well. And you had stories in the media which said, "Here's a family. This is their investment property. The tenants aren't paying the rent, so now the family is forced to sell their investment property." It really felt as though even though we were dealing with a pandemic, the plight of tenants was equal to or at par with the plight of landlords and their investment properties. What do you make of that argument or that discourse? How accurate and fair is it to talk about landlords as small-scale mom-and-pop landlords who are trying desperately to cling onto an investment property or using the rent to stay afloat financially?

Ricardo Tranjan:
I think it's highly inaccurate, and I devote an entire chapter of the book trying to show that it is not actually the case. In Canada, we have a very romanticized notion of landlord. We think about a mom and pop landlords, we think about families struggling to pay their own mortgage and then renting a part of their house. That is usually the, I think, the typical landlord in the minds of a lot of people. That is also the notion and the image that gets often reinforced through media reporting. And then when we look actually at the numbers, we see that a very large share of landlords are increasingly corporate landlords. They're very large firms that owned a very large number of units. And then there's a share that is what we call financialized landlords, which is investment companies that use real estate and rental units as an asset to search for and increase returns on investment.
Then we have some businesses that you could maybe call them small businesses that own a share of the renter stock too. But again, they're businesses and there's nothing that indicates that their operations or their margins of profits are any lower than any other business. And then we have a share of private investors, so people who own a second or third or fourth unit and put those units for rental, for rent. And then I dig up a little bit and I looked at what their finances look like. Their net income is quite high compared to the other segments of the population. And then you get at the end of it, you have a very small share of homeowners whose income is below or around the median income and who rent a portion of their house, it's a room or a basement or some part of their house, in which they also leave in order to bring additional income that allows them to sort of get by. But that is a very small segment of the overall rental market.
So we need to talk about it I think more in terms of landlords as a business practice, as an investment practice versus tenants, more similarly to the way we think about employers and workers. I think that that is a more helpful and more accurate way to think about it. We think about buses and then workers. We should think about landlords and tenants in a similar way rather than thinking about some nice landlord individual who bakes muffins and bring bottles of wines to their tenants because they're all friends and then they live in the same house, right? That exists, but it's not representative.

Joeita Gupta:
It's really interesting to wonder why even though these ideas are so skewed, we continue to harbour these very limited notions about landlords and tenants. The other thing that I've been thinking about a lot is there must no doubt be several myths about tenants. I can just think of a few on my own, which is everybody wants to own a home. If you're not a homeowner, then you haven't "made it," you haven't succeeded in Canada. And that if you are a tenant, you are not there by choice. It's more a temporary stage or a transitory stage. You might be a student and you're renting while you're in university, but eventually, you're going to move on and buy a house. What sort of myths exist about tenants and how have those myths and those ideas contributed to a public discourse and conversation about landlords and tenants?

Ricardo Tranjan:
So to start with the myths about landlord, I think they also serve a political purpose. They serve the political purpose of preventing regularization, preventing strong grant controls, preventing policies that acknowledge the imbalance of power in negotiations between tenants and landlords. When we're assuming this is all very small scale and amicable and that both parties have equal say or equal power, there's less needs for government intervention.
And you think about it. It's not very different than conversations around the minimum wage. Whenever government say, "We're going to increase the minimum wage," it doesn't take more than a couple hours for us to see a new story with the owner of a little small shop on Main Street saying, "You know what? Business aren't great right now. My spouse and I work 15 hours a day. If we increase the minimum wage, we're going to go wonder. We can't afford it. Minimum wage increases should not be approved." And we know that that is not the common minimum wage employer, right? We know the names of the very large corporations and chains and online shopping channels that are actually employing the big chunk of minimum wage workers around the country. And we know that they can more than afford a dollar more an hour to their workers, but they're just not doing it because they want to keep their profit margins high because they want to keep sending big checks to their investors.
But yet it's very useful for those corporations to put the business owner at the little shop down street as the face of the resistance to minimal wage increases. And it's very similar with landlords too. We like putting the mom-pop landlord as the face of the real estate industry that attempt to build more sympathy for their claims. But yeah, we have to cut through that and we have to say, "No thanks. We know you can't afford to pay for the renovations of the buildings. You don't need to pass those costs to tenants."
And then in terms of the stigma around tenants, I think you're absolutely right, and I also devote a chapter to that in the book. In Canada, we put a lot of emphasis on homeownership as the ultimate milestone to achieve that middle-class status. We see that a lot in the sorts of irrational choices that people make when buying a house. We see folks taking on a lot of that, buying old houses without asking for an inspection, beating thousands and thousands of dollars over the asking price. It's not rational from an economic perspective that they're doing that. There's two aspects that could help to explain that kind of behaviour. One of them is the expectation the house price will keep going up and going up. So there's almost like a betting on skyrocketing housing pricing and the fact that we'll make money at the end.
But the second motivation is I believe just an attempt to join the middle class, to not be part of the tenant class, not to have the tenant status anymore, because that comes with a lot of negative stigma in our... And it is not only to Canada, it's a little bit of the sort of anglophone and North American culture of the pull yourself by your bootstraps. And so if you didn't buy a house, it's probably your fault because you didn't work hard enough because you didn't try hard enough. Now you're a tenant, and good luck with it. So there is a lot of stigmas that we have to deal with.
I think the importance of dealing with is to fold one from a kind of political perspective, it's important to get away with the stigma because that would ultimately reinforce the tenant movement and as people become more and more willing to identify with that. And then from more of a policy perspective, if more people admitted to the fact that they might rent for long term or that should be an alternative to them, maybe we would shift the policy conversation a little bit to less emphasis on the homeownership, which we see every election, especially federal elections and more emphasis on what are you going to do about rent controls? But we don't see that too much in the political discourse. And I think at least in part because people prefer to hear about what's going to make their homeownership dream possible, and then politicians just cave in and give that to them.

Joeita Gupta:
I only have time, Ricardo, to squeeze in one last question. I think that question really has to be about the tenant movement that you alluded to in your earlier response. Tell me about some of the tenant organizing you've seen in Canada because there are several chapters in your book dedicated to the history of tenant organizing. So what sort of tenant organizing are we looking at and why is it so powerful for tenants to work as a group? Why isn't it just enough if you're a single tenant dealing with an eviction or dealing with disrepair? Why is it so powerful that instead of coming at these problems as an individual, you would join some kind of a group and work as a collective?

Ricardo Tranjan:
Yes, the tenant movement in Canada goes back since before Confederation. We have seen tenant activism. We have seen it across the country in large cities, in small cities. Pretty much everywhere. Sometimes against momentum, sometimes it recedes a little bit to the background, but it's always there. Presently in Toronto, we have two buildings on grand strikes. Tenants decided to withhold their hands in an attempt to prevent the landlords from applying for above guideline rent increase. And we have seen this in recent years in other buildings. We have seen it in other places in Canada.
When talking about the tenant movement, I find useful to compare it with the labour movement. Like workers on their own, they have very little power of negotiating with the bosses. And so early on, we learned that a long time ago. And so what workers decided to do, they decided to organize first at the factory for a level so that they could engage with demands with their employer directly and ask for better working conditions and decent pay at their factory level. And then eventually they said, "Well, this is a bigger movement. There's an entire working class that needs to be organized" and then we formed larger unions that also had a political role in pushing for legislation that protects tenants overall as a class.
And that has been enormously successful. There would be no middle class here or anywhere without the labour movement. I think the same lesson applies to tenants, and I think that's what we're seeing right now. There's a lot of organizing at the building level that allows tenants to have a much more power and collectively bargaining against rent increases, against evictions, against for repairs that there are never done. And then there's also attempts to create a much larger movement that will push for changing legislation. And it has happened. When we looked at some very basic legislations that we have in place right now that protect tenants, including rent controls where they do exist, you can pretty much trace them back to moments in history and in those provinces where the tenant movement gain momentum and put a lot of political pressure.
So that's why I think that we have a little of too much emphasis on policy solutions right now from the part of so-called progressive folks who are interested in improving housing outcomes to low and moderate income households. We put a lot of pressures on, a lot of... Sorry, we put a lot of attention, a lot of energy, a lot of resources on coming up with those policy solutions. And we need to channel more of that energy and resources to building the political pressure that will make those changes possible. Ideas is not what's missing here, it's really the political pressure to implement those ideas. We know the solution for these things, it's just that there's no one in power right now, really no one interested in implementing those solutions. So there's more energy, more resources, more focus needs to go in supporting these tenants movements and helping them to become stronger and politically salient so we can move to the next stage of talking about how to implement those things.

Joeita Gupta:
Ricardo, thank you so much for the conversation today. It's a really fascinating read, The Tenant class. I really found it an eye-opener and I thought it was a really well-researched and well-written. I'm so glad you could join us on the program today.

Ricardo Tranjan:
Thank you for having me. Always, always, always happy to be here. Please invite me back anytime.

Joeita Gupta:
Yes, absolutely, Ricardo, we'll wait for your next book to come out or your next report, and we would love to have you back on the program. Well, folks, we are running a little short on time today, but that was Ricardo Tranjan, an economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, talking about his really fascinating book, The Tenant Class. It was published just a few weeks ago, and I hope you have a chance to grab a copy. It's a quick but fascinating read.
In the next few episodes, you'll be hearing from Angela Fox who is talking to us about her podcast and book, My Blue Front Door, discussing accessible housing and we'll be checking with our friends at the Accessible Housing Network to get a perspective about being Canadian, disabled, and a homeowner or renter. So I'll hope you'll check back in with us right here on the pulse for some of those conversations.
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