How do Canada’s housing policies affect Black people? The legal framework includes the National Right to Adequate Housing. A variety of provincial human rights legislation prohibits discrimination against specific groups of people. How does this framework pan out in practice? This post is about two reports that have looked into this question and find that Black people get the short end of the stick.
The first report is written by Dr. Nemoy Lewis, who is based at Toronto Metropolitan University. His report was commissioned by Canada’s National Housing Advocate, who is investigating the relationship between housing rights and the financialization of housing in Canada. Lewis takes a look at financialization and how it has affected Black people. Part of his research centres on Toronto, which currently has the highest rental housing costs Canada.
Lewis sorts through the complexities of financialization. As well, data on race in Canada is still sparse, which meant he sifted through a lot of information to discern patterns. Lewis’s analysis demonstrates that race is key in understanding how financialization excludes people (and Black people in particular) from the housing market. Despite the aspirational rights rhetoric, government regulations give the financialization of housing the upper hand.
Lewis identifies changes needed to prevent financialization from overriding the intent of housing rights legislation. He includes strategies to ensure there is a supply of housing for people who are ignored in the private housing market.
The second report comes from the Wellesley Institute, which aims to understand the place of race in housing evictions. Researchers interviewed community leaders and housing workers in neighbourhoods in Toronto with high rates of eviction filings and a high proportion of residents who are Black1. The research teased out three causes for the high rate of eviction notices:
- economic poverty
- landlord incentives to evict
- discrimination against populations, including Black renters.
These findings, which focus on evictions, reinforce Lewis’s conclusions about the significance of race to housing financialization. Race affects individual experiences of Toronto’s housing market. The systems and regulations that govern Toronto’s housing market are directly implicated in that experience.
These studies do focus on Toronto, but don’t despair. They also highlight ways to investigate discrimination, racism and exclusion, which will be of interest in other housing markets in Canada and abroad.
Dr. Lewis’s report is published at the Homeless Hub: The Uneven Racialized Impacts Of Financialization
You can read the second report at the Wellesley Institute: “Fighting to Keep Your Home in a Community”: Understanding Evictions through Service Provider and Community Leader Perspectives in North York Communities
