i’m at the @CERAOntario National Housing Day event!

free screening of @Push_TheFilm plus a sweet panel discussion. i’m ready to get my financialization of housing on

main thesis of housing financialization is that cheap capital is flooding housing markets worldwide and driving the erosion of affordable market housing and pushing people out of cities

by the standards of twitter discourse, financialization is even more boring and harder to pin down than land use / zoning reform and so it tends to imho get short shrift

omg push opens up with gypsy jazz at the communist’s daughter, that brings me back

an explicit theme of the film is that we lack the language to describe the forces at play as capital streams in and out of housing markets

you see the displacement, you see the renovictions, you see the luxury apartments but you don’t see the securities and the mortgages

time for the panel! two housing academics (Hulchanski, August) and the executive director Transparency International Canada, an anti-corruption NGO (Cohen)

panelists offer a good mix of takes

August: it used to be hard to invest in real estate but in recent years there’s been a key shift as it’s become easier to take capital and get income producing assets

(all quotes paraphrased mind you)

Moderator: tell us more about your paper on gentrification and financialization in toronto

August: REITs and institutional investors - financialization landlords - are increasing their ownership of multi family real estate. since 1997, REITs now own about 20% of apartments

financialized landlords are more aggressive at increasing their income streams; biz strategies rely on tenant displacement and dispossession, by cutting costs via economies of scale and withholding maintenance and by squeezing tenants via rent increases & pushing them out

Hulchanski: we’ve known about this since the 90s; consider a rental building & a new development - which one is more expensive? there’s a value gap that investors can exploit, since the replacement cost of a building is so much higher than existing ones

in a deregulated rent environment this incentivizes operators to go after tenants.

Hulchanski grouses that Ontario Liberals avoided revisiting the tenancies act when they returned to power

Moderator, who is with CERA, talks about how in their tenant work they have clients who have face steep, steep rent price gaps between their apartments and current market rates.

Landlords have become very quick to find reasons to evict people

We’re witnessing a “human rights catastrophe”

Moderator: The Three Cities report, which finds that Toronto is becoming divided, what does it mean for housing?

H: the two things that will screw us is climate change and inequality, and both are linked. also racialized: who suffers most from both?

in 20% of census tracts with individual income over $100k they are now 75% white;

he describes the stark socio-economic segregation that Toronto is undergoing; poorer areas are far far more racialized

a new report is coming out on the working poor; a ten year look at how many ppl who work can be defined as poor using a conservative metric. unsurprisingly, the rates have gone up: about 7% of torontonians are working poor

5% of white people are working poor

9.5% of racialized people

10% of Black people

he doesn’t like the term housing affordability cos it’s circular; it’s use began in the 1980s as neoliberalization took over.

who drives housing prices in the city? not poor people. it used to be middle income people, but no longer.

the housing problem is one of income inequali

but now that’s a tax and regulation problem.

in housing journals there’s a new term NFHH: not for housing housing, airbnb, apartments left empty, etc.

drifts into talking about social housing divestment that is still ongoing; thirty years of divestment

quotes Suttor: every year for thirty years we built 4,000 new units. a 130,000 units of social housing we haven’t added to since. this didn’t break the bank and we’re still not doing it with the new National Housing Strategy

Mod: Your org published a report on how criminals love canadian real estate. what are the implications?

<people dash to grab free printed copies of the report>

Cohen: Transparency Int’l is an anti corruption movement, when we started it used to be legal to bribe gov’t officials

it’s very hard to track beneficial ownership of given real estate assets and many are very circuitously owned

property is very attractive to crooks and tax dodgers because it’s high value and it exists in an ecosystem of low reporting

canada exists in a system of low-reporting and minimal oversight of beneficial ownership. also our anti money laundering laws are very weak & many transactions go unreported

compliance rate for real estate agents tracking beneficial owners is extremely low.

lots of sectors in the economy basically not required to report.

recent report in Bc found a single lawyer behind lots of dodgy RE transactions

bad actors rely on having ecosystems of intermediaries willing to look the other way.

they’re looking to have registries of beneficial owners. UK recently issued one tho there are problems with the free form input fields

there’s an effort to do this here but

since corporate registries are provincially run it’s harder to reform.

first report focused on BC where they looked at 100 most valuable properties and in 50% they couldn’t find beneficial owners, all shielded

more recently they examined GTA real estate transactions and found many many billions of dollars of txns done thru unregulated money lenders and intermediaries who don’t have to report

not all this money is laundered but basically: we can’t tell! and it’s not just in BC

H: on top of this people don’t pay taxes! since we don’t know the beneficial owner our tax authorities can’t enforce taxation as effectively

mod: what do we do about this??

August: i hope ppl in audience feel empowered not disempowered. it might seem complicated & these people powerful but the film did show people fighting back and winning. can’t become depressed and stop fighting

humans made this problem and humans can fix it. we see that rent deregulation incentivized these companies - which they flat out list in their investment prospectuses. we know their biz mode is contingent on deregulation & social housing divestment

if you reduce the supply of social housing, you end up with more demand for these companies to exploit. their business model depends on having these captive markets without alternatives

also, REITs are tax advantages vehicles. we can remove tax advantages, reduce financial subsidies from crown corps, the gov’t literally helps these companies exploit the deregulated landscape. we do have levers we can pull, pressure gov’ts to change these regulations

Cohen: the crisis is overdetermined, not just speculation; a beneficial ownership registry alone won’t do anything w/o enforcement. verify identities and chase down money laundering. RCMP anti corruption team was disbanded to go after terrorism and is only now being rebuilt

Hulchanski: it’s like climate change. little by little things added up. same with this: people get fed up and it builds.

advocate, mobilize, organize!

panel is opened to audience q&a.

Q: if policy makers know all this, what’s stopping them from doing something?

H: it is all known and the political class benefits from it. it’s more and more common to see 2nd generation politicians. insert complaint about first past the post

consider last election, what came up? homeowners! biggest institutional impediment to serious change. argues Libs didn’t expect to win the last election which is why they didn’t do electoral reform

August: i think real estate industry has quite a bit of political influence. at an RE conf she attended Doug Ford showed up, and he’s friendly: he’s cutting funding to legal aid clinics which fight landlords

our political elites all own so it can be an uphill battle

when you look at the boards of these companies you see a lot of the same people. the deputy minister of housing in the mid nineties quit to start an REIT after helping to deregulate the market and create these opportunities.

Q: Comment on protecting democratic principles and how they’re being eroded in Ontario, calls out how Comservatives are trying to politicize judicial appointments and drastically speed up legislation to prevent organizing

she works at a legal clinic that serves tenants and shares that new amendments to residential tenancies act are coming soon, they want to weaken tenancy rights to “speed up supply”

(lol she totally hijacked the comment period)

i burned out from throwing events but i figured out a good system for culling bullshit from q&a periods: force people to submit questions on index cards. if you are reading this and host events for the love of god don’t hand people mics

Event ends with a call to support right to housing @R2HTO in our upcoming municipal plan update, important to push that thru