Ideas - There's No Place Like Home: Humanity and the Housing Crisis

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

Our homes hold our memories and hopes for the future. But today, our homes have become commodities. Leilani Farha, the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing, considers what happens when humanity is stripped out of housing — and what it means for us to collectively ‘return home.’ *This episode is part of our IDEAS at Crow’s Theatre series.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. And welcome to a live taping of Ideas at Crow's Theatre in Toronto. Our homes are museums to our past lives. Each corner holds a memory. There's the table where your daughter spoke for the first time.

The couch you sunk into when you were too sad to move. The corner of your kitchen where you danced with a lover for the very first time. And homes also hold our futures. What do we want to be when we grow old? Who do we want to grow old with? But today our homes have become something else. They've become commodities. They're chess pieces in a game where we don't control the rules. So what happens when the humanity is stripped out of housing? When homes become nothing more than assets? Who lives and who dies? Those are just a few of the questions that human rights lawyer Leilani Farha will be exploring today. At a time of polarization and division, we at Ideas are proud to help develop a space where meaningful conversation thrives and curiosity rules.

And what better place to do that than on the stage right here. The fictional lives played out on stage are very much like our own. They're urgent, oftentimes painful, and always unpredictable. With that in mind, we've invited five thinkers to meditate on ideas raised by one of the plays in the Crows Theatre season. Today, as I said, we'll be hearing from Leilani Farha, inspired by the play The Bidding War. In The Bidding War, a satire by Toronto playwright Michael Ross Albert, the last affordable house in the city is for sale. What's supposed to be a routine open house quickly spirals out of control as the characters scramble not just to secure a place of their own,

but to get ahead. As one character puts it, this neighborhood is going to be the last place in the city a home buyer can make a real killing. Today Leilani Farha wants us to have a different kind of conversation about housing, to move beyond supply and demand and the logic of profit and consider the connection between housing and what it means to be human. She has titled her talk, There's No Place Like Home. Leilani Farha is the global director of The Shift, an international human rights organization focused on housing, finance, and climate. She's the former UN special rapporteur on the right to housing and is credited with sparking a global conversation challenging the commodification of people's homes. She also co-hosts the podcast Pushback Talks.

Please help me welcome Leilani Farha. APPLAUSE What a pleasure to be here. Good morning. I love Sunday mornings, which I often spend on my sofa sipping the largest cup of tea under a quilt made by my mother-in-law with a book and my dog, Bean. In fact, my sofa plays a huge role in my life. There's this corner that's just right. When life gets rough, after a particularly hard week, when a sister is sick, or the world has gone mad,

everyone in my family knows it's time to take to the sofa. The phrase itself makes me feel better. My sofa is enormous, L-shaped, and at least nine feet long. It's been host to family and neighbour gatherings for countless sporting events, election nights, and so-you-think-you-can-dance season finales. When I travel, I miss my sofa almost as much as the kids, my partner, and Bean. When I look around my home, I see that it's a configuration of spaces that play multiple roles, functional, social, emotional, artistic, historic. My dining room has a big slab of wood table that seats 10 easily and more when necessary. It's the circumference for family and friend gatherings where board games are won and lost, the weekend paper spread out, and 1,000 piece puzzles put together and taken apart, where big home-cooked turkeys and makluba are served up alongside arguments about climate change, rounds of giving thanks, and tears

over genocide. My front foyer, a place for a million pairs of shoes, where snowsuits have been wrestled on and off, doubles as a dance floor for friends and strangers to lose their inhibition, enter an altered state, and experience complete joy. I have a deep and intimate relationship with home. For 30 years, my career has focused on the human right to housing, understood as the right to live in peace, security, and with dignity. No doubt, I have been inside more homes in more countries than most people. I have spent an inordinate amount of time investigating who is lucky enough to enjoy the right to housing, who's denied it, who's to blame, and what can be done to make sure more people have it. As the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to housing, I spent six years visiting people in their homes in every region

of the world and talking to them about home truths. I visited an older man in Seoul, South Korea, living in a shambles of a dormitory, his unit just larger than a coffin. He whispered to me his humiliation of a failed marriage, a lost job. And then there was the single mother in San Diego whom I met in a church parking lot, living in her car with her two teenaged daughters and her three-year-old. She had done everything right and still couldn't afford the rent. The father in Chile who put aside his machismo with me, me, a complete stranger, and through tears explained that the government was forcing him to leave his home, a home he had built with his own hands to accommodate his son's

physical disability. And the conversation I had with a young mother from the Congo living in a windowless Paris motel room beside a bar and the men's bathroom. She'd been raped on her journey to Europe, and her fear that it would happen again filled the space between us. I have seen people make home out of literally nothing. Corrugated steel, branches, shipping containers, trailers, two-by-four planks, on sidewalks, under bridges, beside railway tracks. Invariably, no matter the context, circumstances, or worthiness of the structure, there's an effort to make it home. A clothesline across the way, plants and flowers carefully tended to, a framed photo on a rickety table, kids' toys under the bed, a rice cooker in the corner, a plastic chair for the weary. No matter the context or circumstance, a tent on a sidewalk in India, a post-communism hovel in Serbia, a flooded informal settlement in Lagos, a lean-to in Cabo Verde,

an earthquake-shaken apartment building in Mexico City. I am invited into these homes, offered a cup of tea, a biscuit, and a chat. The humanity in the interaction consistently The humanity in the interaction consistently overwhelms me. The emotional connection to home, its relationship to our darkest and sunniest corners, our secrets, our despair, is real and deep. Home, as both a concept and its material reality, has such richness. No matter where I have been, the country, the city, the neighborhood, the home, the people experiencing housing precarity and homelessness, where home hangs by a thread, say remarkably similar things,

in particular, and often through tears. They say they just want to be seen, to be treated like human beings. They cling to their homes and with it their dignity and humanity. Home moves us far beyond the realm of structure and touches deep into what it is to be human, to exist. I recently heard it said of Palestinians, land is not where they live, it is who they are. Perhaps it's not surprising that the richness of home finds its expression in the voices and words of poets and writers,

especially those who have had to leave home, displaced by conflict and colonialism. I think of Warsan Shire's now famous poem, Home. Warsan was born in Kenya to Somali parents who emigrated to England when she was one. Her phrases are haunting, reflecting the refugee experience and the simple yet profound idea that home is deeply rooted in us and it is where we are meant to be.

No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark, she writes. You have to understand that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land. No one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying, leave, run away from me now. Your identity is interwoven with your home. When we are displaced from our homes, the disruption isn't just material. displaced from our homes, the disruption isn't just material. There's a disruption in how we understand ourselves, a disruption to our sense of belonging. It can be an emotional exile as much

as a physical one. Mohamed El-Kurd is a Palestinian poet and writer known alongside his twin sister for protesting the forced eviction of Palestinians from their homes by Israeli settlers in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. In his poem, Rifka, he writes, I cried not for the house, but for the memories I could have inside it. In a foreword to this beautiful and painful book, the poet Aja Monet comments, these words remind me that home is a series of shared memories, not brick and mortar. Home is where we go to remember and revisit who we've always been. What happens when we're displaced from the places that hold who we've always been? Who do we become?

I have been in conversation about the idea of Gaza recovery and reconstruction with a number of diaspora Palestinians, including my friend Ala Radwan. She fled Gaza this spring with her young family. She recently posted on Instagram, it's past three in the morning and sleep has abandoned me. My phone glows softly in the dark as I scroll through pictures of my home in Gaza, a place I poured my soul into, each corner shaped by my dreams, each wall painted with quiet triumph. It was more than bricks and walls. It was a haven, a place where every inch held my hopes, my struggle, my quiet victories. Across lands, waters, and cultures back in Canada, Métis Cree poet, writer, and advocate Jesse Thistle, author of From the Ashes, talks about home not as a structure of habitation, but rather something that must be understood through a composite lens of Indigenous worldviews.

Jesse says, from the Indigenous experience, home is about spiritual and cultural belonging and the relationship to land, water, place, family, kin, each other, animals, cultures, languages, and identities. I love this. It's like home is everything. I was recently introduced to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Calvino talks more about place than home, but there are parallels. He invites us to understand how place is both a physical space and a repository of meaning, dreams, and human experiences that transcend their material reality. His work reminds me of the Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard who said way back in the 50s that home quote shelters daydreaming, protects the dreamer, allows one to dream in peace. Is it all too romantic? On some level, of course it is. Home can be the site of real violence, of discrimination. A lot of people grow up wanting or needing to leave home.

At the same time, and even so, there is something essential to being human about home. That's what the poets, particularly those whose relationship with home has been disrupted so clearly portray. And it's this deep, interdependent, fused relationship between home and being human, home and humanity, that drew me to the world of housing and that keeps me there. These days, these expansive considerations of home, home's relationship to being, its ability to conjure all the senses, its inspiration, and its connections to past, present, and future, is difficult to find. This is because the idea of home has been and is being systematically dismantled brick by brick,

displaced and erased. Home's poetry is lost. Housing has taken its place. For decades now, governments and those in the housing sector, investors, developers, and the like, have taken measures to pivot housing away from the people who will inhabit it, the people who turn a house into a home, toward those with pecuniary interests and have at the same time stripped it of its poetry. In so doing, they've taken something essential away from us. They have radically altered our material reality and stunted the possibilities for our futures. If I had to trace the roots of this shift, the beginning of the end, so to speak, I'd go to the late 70s, early 80s, when Western nations started to embrace neoliberal ideology, an ideology that is born of colonialism and that certainly

replicates it. I think the advent of neoliberalism is where the foundation was laid for the takeover of home. Think Margaret Thatcher, Reaganomics, Milton Friedman, and right here in Canada, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin. Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz describes neoliberalism as stripping away regulations, lowering taxes, and letting the market do whatever it wanted to do. In spite of evidence to the contrary, the belief was, he says, that in the absence of government intervention, markets would by themselves be competitive. Those at the top were given incentives and benefits on the theory that they would create economic growth that those at the bottom would benefit from. You may know this idea as trickle-down economics. What happens to the individual and the household in a neoliberal economy is what interests me.

I think writer and podcaster Stephen Metcalf captures it. He explains it this way. Peer through the lens of neoliberalism and you see more clearly how the political thinkers most admired by Thatcher and Reagan helped shape the ideal of society as a kind of universal market and of human beings as profit and loss calculators and not bearers of grace or of inalienable rights. It was a way of reordering social reality and of rethinking our status as individuals. It's chilling. A social reengineering of sorts that reached right into your home to disrupt the relationship between people and where they live.

Prior to neoliberalism, in the 30 years after World War II, Canada had a different vision. Faced with a housing crisis as soldiers returned home, the federal government stepped in with a simple idea. Everyone in Canada deserved a home. They provided a variety of housing options to meet people in their place. It wasn't perfect, but at that time, for example, homelessness was a discrete problem, not a social phenomenon. Then came the great neoliberal dismantling, the reorientation of government away from households, the human family, and toward market actors. Governments got out of the business of housing, including social housing, and started to rely on the private market to produce more of Canada's housing stock, courting private developers, offering them cheap money and loans,

along with regulatory support and tax incentives. money and loans, along with regulatory support and tax incentives. Private developers had free reign while governments gutted tenant protections and removed rent controls. Those who needed affordable housing most were left in the dust. In 1998, Canada's National Anti-Poverty Organization told the UN, as a result of financial cutbacks, legislative and regulatory changes, and jurisdictional downloading, most of Canada's urban centres are experiencing a critical lack of affordable, safe and secure housing. As low-income Canadians are forced to use scarce financial resources to pay higher shelter costs or risk homelessness, they are having to rely more on limited charitable community services for basic necessities such as food and clothing. clothing. Canada seemed to be to be hitting rock bottom. Those developers and the market were not producing the kind of housing that people needed, especially low-income people.

You'd think things couldn't get worse, but they did. And that brings us to the era we're in now. I call it financialized neoliberalism. It's basically neoliberalism on steroids, where the steroid is the unprecedented amounts of capital in the hands of extremely wealthy and powerful financial firms. Housing became financialized in about the early 2000s. The financialization of housing is when homes are treated as an instrument of finance, often traded and sold on the stock market, aggressively plundered by already wealthy financial actors for their value.

A reinvention of colonialism. As a result, residential real estate has become, quite literally, the biggest business in the world. Its value? 287 trillion US.S. dollars. It's three times bigger than the world's GDP. It's bigger than pharma. It's bigger than oil and gas, gold and tech.

Homes have been invaded by financial actors, hedge funds, private equity and asset management firms, pension funds, and insurance companies. Just like the colonizers before them, their goal is to extract wealth from the property they've taken over. Professor of sociology Saskia Sassen calls it an extractive industry, where high finance buys affordable housing, which we call home, but which they view as an asset, a resource with economic value. They use algorithmic mathematics to transform our homes into an asset, an abstract resource that could be anything. It could be a widget, a hospital bed, railway tracks. The result is that tenants, the people living in these assets, are simply regarded as the raw material for wealth generation. Their presence and economic activity leveraged for capital accumulation.

So in a financialized world, you may think you live in an apartment building or a house. You may be walking down the street and you see an apartment building or a home and you think, oh, that's an apartment building. That's a home. But in a financialized world, what you're seeing is not that. What you're seeing is an asset. And the owner of that asset will treat it and you in the same way. On Ideas, you've been listening to There's No Place Like Home by Leilani Farha, the global director of The Shift and the former UN special rapporteur on the right to housing, recorded at Crow's Theatre in Toronto. You can hear Ideas wherever you get your podcasts, and on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas.

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Today's talk is part of a new series we've developed with Crow's Theatre in Toronto, an opportunity to explore some of the ideas that animate great theatre and shape our own lives today. The play at hand today is The Bidding War, a dark satire by Michael Ross Albert about what happens when the last affordable house in the city goes up for sale. The financialized housing model has come to dominate most cities throughout the world, including this one. The actors in Canada are names you've no doubt heard. Starlight, Interrent, PSP Investments, Akelius, Capri, Dream, Boardwalk, Minto. All of these financial companies, and let's be clear, they are not housing developers. They are ultimately financial firms.

Use the same playbook. Buy what they call undervalued properties, single-family homes or, more commonly, apartment buildings. Squeeze out more profits through rent increases and extra fees, drive tenants out if doing so results in greater profits, and reposition the unit or the building as luxury for bigger revenue streams. Or they leave it empty for land value to do the work for them. Regardless, they laugh all the way to the bank. Raquel Rolnick, who was also a UN special rapporteur on housing, suggests that the financialization of housing has created a kind of urban warfare. She sees it as an aggressive process that creates conflict-like situations. For homeowner wannabes, investor activity and housing speculation is an attack on their dreams

and creates a pressure cooker environment, people scrambling to pull together down payments or taking out private mortgages at exceptionally high interest rates and then engaging in bidding wars while sellers try to make a killing. Tenants are under attack by global investors who invade their communities and raise rents and with it property values, perpetrate evictions often en masse and force displacement from their gentrifying neighborhoods. And this conflict produces real casualties in the form of homelessness, housing insecurity, community displacement, loss of social networks, and support systems. Tenants, says Raquel Rolnick, are essentially turned into refugees

in their own cities. The impact of this urban warfare is that home as a place to dream, to create an identity, a connection to land, water, and animals, that idea of home seems so distant. In the urban context, we've replaced humanity with asset classes, mathematics, ledgers, return on investment, fiduciary duties, best use, valuations, securities, but no security. The poetry of home has been erased, the home-humanity connection severed. When you dehumanize home, you dehumanize people. When tenants are just part of an algorithm or a mathematical equation, considered only for their potential to increase property value and corporate profits, they are reduced to something less than, other than human. Essential, yes, but dispensable once they no longer fulfill their function. In a world where people are only of interest for their contribution to capital gains, those who have no economic clout, people living in homelessness,

who need social housing or social supports to survive, those people quite literally count for nothing. And when people count for nothing, you can do to them what you will. Dehumanizing home and people makes it easy to take policy decisions that are cruel and almost unthinkable. Things like raising rents to rates that people cannot afford, forcing people out of their homes with nowhere affordable to go, involuntarily committing people to psychiatric and other institutions, committing people to psychiatric and other institutions, forcibly evicting homeless people from their tents in parks when they have no other reasonable accommodation, a measure that is known

to hasten death. We have to ask ourselves, where is this leading us? It's a slippery slope to my mind, and it's terrifying. What's possible when we completely sever the human connection to home, to place, to housing, to belonging? Look to Gaza. Genocide. Look to Lebanon. Look to Lebanon. Look to Sudan. And so the question that keeps me up at night and gets me up early in the morning is, how do we return home? The home that Warsan Shire, Mohammed Al-Kurd, Aja Monet, Ala Radwan and others speak of.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's as easy as clicking our heels three times like Dorothy while repeating, there's no place like home. But I do think we have the power to find our way back, just as Dorothy did. A return home requires not only that we challenge neoliberal ideology and its financialized version, it requires that we develop and promote an alternative vision, one with different values, that puts a primacy on humanity. As Kevin Bell, a former Supreme Court justice in Australia,

recently wrote, values produce actions and outcomes. If you do not have the right values, you will not have the right actions and outcomes. Valuing housing primarily as a commodity for private investment is deeply entrenched in the system. So with some trepidation and self-consciousness, but backed by Kevin Bell, I'd like to assert that the alternative vision and values already exist and can be found in international human rights law. Perhaps a tough sell in light of the state of the world right now, where violations of human rights with impunity is fashionable, electable, in fact. But there are three things that make human rights potentially transformative. First, international human rights have both political buy-in and legal authority. They were universally agreed upon at a political level in 1948, and since then, human rights laws have been

committed to universally as legal obligations, which affirm the human right to housing, and to which countries around the world, like Canada, have ratified. Second, human rights return us to first principles. They get us back to a kind of essence. They strip away the noise. Think of the opening words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948, which lays as its foundation the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.

The human family. The Declaration also asserts, quite simply and profoundly, in its first article, Quite simply and profoundly in its first article, all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Human rights attach to us because of our being human. They aren't earned. The right to housing is one of those rights. Profit-seeking companies who undermine that right simply have no business in our homes. When housing is recognized and implemented as a human right, we recognize home as the foundation of our shared humanity. This means ensuring housing for people who are

homeless, laws that protect tenants not shareholders, and it means building homes not investment vehicles. The third reason human rights are transformative is because they provide us with a roadmap on how to do housing. They offer standards and outcomes that laws and policies must be designed to achieve. For example, that there be enough affordable housing for those in need, regardless of income level. That housing also be habitable and secure. That evictions should be an exception and not a rule, that homelessness should be rare and must be addressed and prevented. Human rights offer a process, one that puts human beings at the

center of all housing-related policies and decisions, so that people can have a say in the policies that are going to affect their lives. Do tenants think their building should be sold to a multinational hedge fund? Do tenants think rents should be raised when a unit is vacant? Who should pay for improvements made to an apartment building. Human rights also require monitoring and accountability. Human rights are illusory if there is no one to hold to account for infringement of those rights. This means there must be places for people to claim their right to housing. Tribunals, councils, courts. It also means that governments have to hold themselves accountable, for example, by reporting to the public about their achievements

and failures, recalibrating policies where they're failing to achieve human rights outcomes. And they have to hold private actors involved in housing to account as well, to make sure they are not undermining the right to housing. I think human rights have the power to lead us back home. And while the language of human rights may not be particularly poetic, I put to you that human rights play precisely the role that poetry does. In one of her famous essays, the self-described black lesbian mother warrior poet, Audrey Lord Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change. made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. Poetry is not only dream or vision. It is the skeleton architecture of our lives.

It is the skeleton architecture of our lives. Just like poetry, human rights are not fanciful or aspirational. They are infrastructure. They are the skeleton architecture of our lives and provide an outline of what human wholeness, well-being, and potential can look like, offering an idea of who we are and who we want to be. Human rights reorient relationships to focus on our shared humanity and the promotion of human dignity. on our shared humanity and the promotion of human dignity. They reset the terms of the world around us so that when we see a home, it's just that, a home.

Thank you. Thank you. So right now, as I said, I'm going to have a few questions for Leilani. I have a whole jumble of questions here, so many. But I want to start with where you ended. You talk about human rights as infrastructure, and notwithstanding, as you say, Kevin Ball, your assertion that human rights or that housing should be seen through the lens of human rights feels like a far bigger project than just you know, than just the situation with

housing. It feels really almost unattainable. What do you say to that? Well, for the people who are experiencing what I would call violations of the right to housing, it doesn't seem impossible. It seems necessary. I mean, every person that I've met in those circumstances is a believer in the human right to housing because they experience what it's like without it. And they know there must be a better place and a better world, especially in developed, affluent countries, right? Because they're looking around saying, okay, like I can see other people are doing okay, mighty fine, in fact. And so my work has always come from those voices, those experiences. And so that's where the belief is, I think.

In terms of like world orders and government structures and, okay, yeah, that's an uphill battle. But I think in this country, we're, I mean, we are in the midst of one of the worst housing crises, I would say globally, actually. But we are building human rights infrastructure within the country. So we have new legislation from 2019 that recognizes the federal government's policy, understands that housing is a fundamental human right. That's a big step for a country. It's taken 30 or 40 years for neoliberalism to do its dirty work. And so it's going to take a long time for that kind of legislative infrastructure to have real meaning. Yeah. I was really struck by a number of things that you said in your statement or in your

lecture. One was that the situation with housing is something akin to urban warfare, and I can attest to feeling that recently as I've made my own moves across the city. But it's a very sobering picture that you paint, and I think everybody here could attest to that as well. But even more so, that you talked about the process as a reinvention of colonialism. How far can we take that parallel, do you think? Can we take it into the realm of solutions as well? I would think so. You know, I toyed with that word. Is it a reinvention? Is it a replication? So I'm not actually sure what the right frame is. Its roots are in colonialism,

we can say that. And so I think there has to be so much undoing in this country in particular. In fact, I was talking about that last night at a very nice dinner party, the idea of, yeah, we need to, I think, go back to basics. And that's why I love human rights, because it really does take us back to basics. What do we value? And I think the history of dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands and resources should have been a huge lesson, and it wasn't. And so I think we do kind of have, when we're looking for solutions, when we're moving forward, we have to look at, okay, if this continues, we know where this ends up. That's the history of this country, dispossessing people of land, property, resources.

So we know what that looks like. So yes, it should weigh into the solutions. I do want to kind of address, in this scenario that you draw, the people who are affected by all this, which is the everyday Canadian or person living in this country. Literally down the street from here, there's an encampment that I pass by almost on a daily basis. We all pass by. And we may not out loud agree with the situation. In fact, we might deplore it. But we seem indifferent to it in our actions. I just wonder what you say. I mean, so the parallel on colonization is one thing. But what does that say about us, do you think, as a society, notwithstanding that the blame really does sit at the feet of governments?

society notwithstanding that the blame really does sit at the feet of governments yeah I mean I think a lot of people are so deeply distressed by what's happening in cities across Canada with respect to homelessness I haven't met anyone who says yeah it's great or yeah you know I think at this point it's understood as so widespread that it is systemic I think people don't know what to do about it and I also think and that's part of what I was people don't know what to do about it. And I also think, and that's part of what I was trying to get at in my comments, I think if we continue down this road of dehumanizing people by talking about housing in the way that we do now as this commodity, you know, homeless people are disappearing as people. And so it's really easy then to drive by and not really pay attention. But then the flip of that, I wonder, when I was writing this, and I think, I hope I was able to

reflect, there's a kind of painfulness for me around this, around the loss of humanity through home. And, you know, I sort of wonder if it's all too much for people to bear so you're going about your busy life in Toronto and you're trying to get from point a to point b to make your money to pay your mortgage or whatever pay your rent and is it just too much to take on board how awful it is that we have people living in our parks and on our streets is it it just too heavy? And I mean, for me, when I look at the last 14 months, and then I add to it my work around homelessness, sometimes it really is just all too much. And we maybe need for self-preservation to turn away. And that's not a good thing. And that's why we have to solve this, right? Yeah. There's a sense in which we as a society kind of have a hierarchy of

homeless, you know, that there's a deservingness ladder on which we put, you know, some of us would maybe put someone who's been displaced from another country. And yet there are people who say, well, why are we housing those people and not taking care of, you know, the taxpayers at home? How do we disabuse ourselves of this compulsion to rate who deserves homes more than others? Well, that's where human rights is so perfect too, because of the universality. And I mean, human rights don't work if they're only applied to some people and not other people. And so just the idea that we're all born with this set of human rights, regardless of whether we end up with an addiction to a street drug or whether we are a refugee, we are all born with the same set of rights and all of those rights have to be implemented. many people here will be familiar with this, it's been in the news a lot lately, is that group of mayors who are in Ontario, who are asking Premier Ford to give them permission to clear housing

encampments by using the notwithstanding clause to get around the charter, right to life, liberty, and security of the person. If part of your goal is to reintroduce the value of life and rights to conversations about housing, at the risk of asking and rights to conversations about housing at the risk of asking too big a question and maybe beyond the scope of this conversation but but what what should be done i mean there is a simple answer which is you know if governments just took seriously that housing is a human right and that it has as i said in my speech that it has substance and that there's a process and that they have to be accountable, then we would be moving much further towards solutions. It is the failure to implement housing as a human right that got us where we are now. And so what I always say to governments

when I'm sitting down with them is you should be producing human rights outcomes. So regardless of what your policy is, you have to look at it. Is this going to contribute to affordable, secure housing for the population? Is this somehow going to undermine that? It's a pretty simple equation. There's a failure in this country to connect our, it's not just refugees, to connect all of the policies and ministries that need to be connected. I remember years ago, I tried to get a meeting with the minister who was responsible for housing at the time at the federal level, and the minister was responsible for immigration at the time. I asked if I could have a joint meeting with them because I was concerned about refugees and migrants to Canada and where they were going to live. And this was during the Syrian refugee crisis.

And I could not get the two, and it wasn't a scheduling issue. I mean, I couldn't get the two in the same room. They would not meet. It just wouldn't happen. And without that kind of coordination, of course, people are going to fall through the cracks. The solution, though, is not to limit refugees coming to this country or immigrants coming to this country. I mean, that is pointing the finger at the wrong problem. The key is to make sure that we have a housing policy that's robust to meet the needs of the nation. The needs of this nation is to bring migrants and refugees here, not just because they contribute immensely to Canadian society, but because that's the country Canada is. We are known as offering a safe place for people who are fleeing conflict, etc.

That's the country we want to be so why would we deprive ourselves of being that country why wouldn't we just come up with better housing policy actually it sort of raises another question about just the overall position from which you you come at all of this you were in international you know a un rapporteur. And now you also speak out about housing. But you don't even really like the word housing in your title as the UN Special Rapporteur. Can you explain that? Can you explain why that is? In a way, my whole speech was about hating the word housing. It's not a poetic word. Like say it in your mouth, housing. It doesn't sit nicely, doesn't come out well. There's not that much that rhymes with it.

It's just like not a good word. That's one. Two, housing, it doesn't convey all that richness that I just love to dwell in these days. So housing versus home. If you talk like housing, then people think, oh no, she's going to start talking about zoning. I find a lot of housing policy kind of boring. It's when I talk about housing as a human right, that for me, it really starts to get me going and gives me some energy.

I wonder if you could explain in your experience and your knowledge of, as you say, you visited so many homes and spoken to so many people about home, how heritable the absence of home is. I mean, what are the long, I guess what I'm asking is what are the long-term consequences of people who are homed in a precarious situation or maybe not housed at all? Well, it breaks people's spirit for sure. I mean, this Chilean man, right, crying with me on, we were on a mountainside. And the reason the government said he had to move, he'd been living there for 20 years. They said he had to move because it was an earthquake risk. There had just been an earthquake and his house was like perfectly sound. was like perfectly sound. You know, there he is revealing himself to me, crying with me, or the man in Seoul, right? Telling me this story of humiliation. It breaks people. That's for me, the hardest part of it. There are other more practical and unfortunate things. Health consequences, preventable diseases, lower life expectancy, shorter, excuse diseases lower life expectancy shorter excuse me life expectancy family disillusion loss of children i mean in this country that's a huge issue for indigenous women

who lose their children because they have inadequate housing i mean it's the the the long-term repercussions of this are not good and And really, it's at that human level that it's so disturbing. Yeah. Leilani Farha, thank you so much for your insights today. Really learned a lot. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. On Ideas, you've been listening to There's No Place Like Home by human rights lawyer Leilani Farha. She's the global director of The Shift and the former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to housing.

This was the second in a series of five talks this season inspired by great plays produced in association with Crow's Theatre in Toronto. Ideas at Crowows Theatre is produced by Philip Coulter and Pauline Holdsworth. Special thanks to Paolo Santalucia, Chris Abraham, Carrie Sager, and the entire Crows Theatre team.

For Ideas, our technical producer is Danielle Duval, our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. Thank you for being here.

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