Housing is meant to be a foundation: a place to be safe, raise a family and take part in community life. Around the world, it has instead become one of the largest financial assets, viewed as a source of wealth for investors and corporations at everyone else’s expense.
Join Leilani Farha, the 2026 CBC Massey Lecturer and former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, for a conversation about her new book, Housing, Inc.: A Global Takeover and Our Fight for Home. Farha traces how housing was turned from a vital human need into a vehicle for wealth. She argues that rising rents, evictions, homelessness and encampments are not accidents. They are the predictable results of policy choices.
She also looks at what this system costs the planet, as speculative construction, empty units and neglected buildings tie the housing crisis to the climate crisis.
Farha’s argument comes from experience. As Special Rapporteur from 2014 to 2020, and now as co‐founder and Global Director of The Shift, an international human rights organization, she has visited people in their homes in every region of the world: in apartments and informal settlements, in encampments, on sidewalks and in cars.
The problem, Farha says, is not for lack of a road map, but a refusal to acknowledge, study and truly implement the human right to housing and its standards of protection. All of her work rests on one principle: housing is a human right, not a commodity.
There will be a book signing to follow the formal program.