Reviewed by L. Lois
Housing Inc.
by Leilani Farha
House of Anansi Press
Series: The CBC Massey Lectures
ISBN: 9781487014285, 288 pages, Sept 2026
Housing has long been the architecture of who counts and who doesn’t, who lives and who dies—which is why, wherever people are being destroyed, their homes are being destroyed too. (12)
The Massey Lecture Series is Canada’s megaphone for thinking. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967 and Margaret Atwood in 2008 — annually, one luminary with ideas takes their message on the road. In Canada’s quaint, artistic, nerdy tradition, House of Anansi Press issues a companion book, authored by the lecturer.
This year’s publication is Housing Inc., featuring former United Nations special rapporteur, Leilani Farha. From 2014-20, Farha travelled widely, championing housing as outlined in the UN-ratified agreement on economic, social, and cultural human rights.
Farha has thoughts on housing. Specifically, on the role of corporate financial investment in our homes.
She asks why human decency and regulatory oversight continue to fail the disadvantaged and the non-investor. What happens to a person, she posits, when they don’t have a place to call home?
Why is the name on title papers more powerful than the name on the rent cheque? If homework is completed in a shelter, is it shelterwork? Why did grandma have to move after grandpa passed away? Does rent control lead to loopholes and renovictions? Is a bulldozer reasonable for a tent filled with snoring?
These are questions circling property rights, capitalism, finite resources, and income inequality. Farha talks of her own home and of the plight of the immigrant, forced from a homeland by war. The conundrum keeps circling. Which First Nations family might have slept on the same plot of land she and her family now sleep on? The displaced occupy places of displacement.
Farha’s attention and frustration (nay, her parceled-out ire) are reserved for the contemporary land baron. The lord of the land. The one who owns but resides elsewhere. The one who owns more than they can possibly sleep on.
It’s difficult to argue with her anecdotal and statistical logic. But will the villain recognize their reflection in the mirror?
Insecurity collapses the future into a permanent, anxious present. (107)
…the mind stays focused on survival rather than growth, creativity, or connection. (105)
…that space began to remember me. (19)
As a lawyer, Farha sets the stage and argues her case. The aroma coming from our family kitchens is more important than stockholder returns. We all need a place to call home. Tonight, all of us will lay our head down somewhere.
We’ve designed a society that protects what is owned. Who protects what is homed?
A structure without electricity, in a Westernized urban setting, is insufficient housing. A home where rent is collected in sexual favours is exploitive. A tent might be an ancestral home, but today it isn’t permitted. Expropriation can be labelled common good. A man sleeps upright in his wheelchair on the sidewalk.
The fortunes of others tuck in at night while the stock market rests.
Around the world, millions of people go to sleep surrounded by walls they don’t trust, or by no walls at all. The homeless, the under-housed, those under threat of eviction, the squatter. Farha believes it doesn’t have to be.
She served at the UN for six years. During that time, global rates of homelessness and displacement worsened. She says the markets are to blame, the owners of land, the corporate landlord. She makes a strong case. Her hammer finds lots of nails.
Her solutions come with sighs and resignation. The rich must take responsibility for the inequality baked into their hoarding. Governments, themselves landlords in every sense of the word, must legislate and enforce regulation. The argument is for decency. For the realization that to have a home is to have identity and dignity.
How to mandate decency is a difficult problem. Is the jig already up, when we need the UN to define compassion and mutual care? In our greed and our glee, have we forgotten we are our brother and sister, and they are us?
Some grow rich on the revenue they tell themselves their assets have earned. There are asset holdings and revenue sources. But who is taking responsibility for the other side of the financial statements, for the liabilities, the losses, the harm?
Boiled down, Farha suggests heightening regulations and removing the profit incentive from housing. However, Western history hasn’t chosen this route. In its quest to find nails, Farha’s hammer may find a tattered blue tarp instead, flapping in the wind.
How many voices does it take to achieve adequate housing for all? Where has history left the blueprint for enforcement of egalitarian compassion? Through CBC global podcasts and Anansi Press’s Housing Inc., Leilani Farha and the Massey Lectures have stated the challenge. There is justice; we can link arms and hammer it home.
Housing is not a luxury. It is a requirement for human existence. (3)
About the reviewer: L. Lois lives in an urban hermitage where trauma-informed themes flow during walks by the ocean. She is pivoting into her grandmother-era, figuring out why her bevy of adult children don’t have babies, while prioritizing writing, publication, and arts-related volunteerism. Her poems have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, The Brussels Review, Poetry Pause and Hanging Loose Magazine, among other publications. L. Lois is a Member of the League of Canadian Poets, is part of the editorial team at Bellevue Literary Review and Quibble Lit and freelances as a business feature writer and poetry workshop leader. A selection of her published work is linked at https://poeting.my.canva.site.