Housing: A Human Right
Housing is shelter, not an investment. The crisis isn't a shortage of clever policy ideas. It is a system that lets the wealthy hoard homes while migrants, the unhoused, and the poor are left out in the cold. We organize for housing as a right, and against the people who profit from its absence.
February 15, 2023
Often, the housing crisis is talked of as one that migrants are responsible for. However, there is no housing shortage for the rich. There are empty units held as assets, homes flipped into short term rentals, and rents pushed as high as the market will carry, all while people sleep outside and migrant families get packed into overpriced, unsafe rooms by landlords who know we have nowhere else to go. None of this is an oversight. It is what happens when shelter is treated as a commodity and people are treated as a margin.
Migrants did not cause this, and we are blamed for it anyway, while landlords, developers, and speculators quietly profit from the scarcity they create. Housing is supposed to be a human right. A right you can buy, flip, and leave empty for profit is not being treated like one.
We demand:
- Homes taken off the market, not just "more units": Real public and cooperative housing, community land trusts, and permanently affordable homes that belong to the people who live in them, not to someone's portfolio.
- Protection for tenants with teeth: Binding rent control, an end to renovictions and displacement, and housing you can access without an immigration status, a credit check, or a landlord's approval.
- An end to hoarding: Tax and reclaim homes left chronically empty and unregulated short term rentals, and put that housing back into people's hands.
- Dignity for the unhoused: Stop criminalizing homelessness. Fund shelter and low barrier supportive housing as care, not as policing, sweeps, or displacement.
We don't just ask for this. We build it through mutual aid, tenant solidarity, and a refusal to let our neighbours get pushed out one eviction at a time. Housing insecurity doesn't stop at a status line, and neither does our organizing. Everyone deserves a home. No one is illegal on stolen land, and no one should be homeless on it either.