In the summer of 2021, I visited a homeless community in a park in Toronto, Canada, and spoke to one of the residents. He was living in a tent in the shadow of brand new skyscrapers and had been homeless for about five years. At one point he turned around, pointed up at a crane on the skyline, and said: “Who are they building those for? Definitely not for me.”
He was right. And he captured something that ordinary people around the world are experiencing: a growing conviction that the housing system is no longer tied to their needs. What he was pointing at is not just a housing crisis. It is a crisis of democracy.
Democracy promises that our living conditions are shaped by all of us, regardless of our position in life. Yet decisions about housing have been systematically removed from democratic control and handed to financial actors such as private equity firms, pension funds and real-estate investment trusts. Working hand in hand with governments and banks, these actors have separated the price of housing from what ordinary people earn. They have turned our homes into a toy for wealthy investors. I call this alliance Housing Inc.
The tools available to the large financial actors who drive and profit from the housing crisis are not available to the rest of us. They hire armies of lobbyists to crush rent-control laws. They fund political campaigns. They move in and out of government positions. They are in the rooms and hallways where decisions are made.
Even governments trying to fight the growing influence of the financial sector in housing face intense pressure. In Copenhagen, after the private equity giant Blackstone bought up apartment blocks across the city, renovated them and, in some cases, doubled the rent for new tenants, the Danish parliament passed legislation barring new owners from raising rents on renovated apartments for five years. While this “Blackstone law,” as it was commonly called, was a brave measure, it was weaker than the government had wanted. Kaare Dybvad, then Denmark’s housing minister, had proposed a 10-year freeze. Faced with fury from landlords and pension funds, and needing rightwing party votes to pass it, he cut it to five.
The average tenant, the person experiencing homelessness, the young person locked out of the housing market – what do they have? They have a vote. That is all.
And the vote changes less than we are promised. As the economist Yanis Varoufakis has argued, elections no longer determine economic policy. Governments of the left and the right come and go, and regardless of who is in power, rents keep rising, because the economic model always stays the same: money flows to wherever the returns are highest, which means into unproductive assets such as real estate, and away from the public investment that would actually house people. We can change our governments. We cannot, it seems, change the economic policies they all adhere to.
Who decided that financial firms could use our homes as investments? Not the public. Consider the bundling of mortgages into securities, which laid the groundwork for the 2008 financial crisis, or the decision in more than 40 jurisdictions to exempt real-estate investment trusts from corporate income tax. Both happened out of public view, shaped by governments and financial actors, with no public debate.
The same thing happens with other kinds of housing investment. Take short-term rentals in Athens. While democracy may have been born there, it hasn’t always thrived. After the global financial crisis, Greeks were forced to accept brutal austerity measures against their will. Property values collapsed, wages fell and ordinary families struggled to make ends meet. For many property owners, renting to tourists through short-let platforms such as Airbnb became a lifeline – a way to generate income from an asset that had lost most of its value.
But what began as a survival strategy for families became an investment strategy for foreign buyers. The government introduced a “golden visa” programme in 2013, offering residency to any foreigner whoThey bought property in Greece. Thousands did—not to live there, but to turn apartments into short-term rentals, betting on Greece’s tourism industry as a good investment. As foreign capital poured in, long-term housing became scarcer, rents soared, and neighborhoods like Exarchia and Koukaki began to change beyond recognition. Athenians protested, and their government responded by sending in riot police and crushing dissent to defend its decisions.
What’s offered as genuine civic engagement for the people most affected by the housing crisis tends to be watered down, inadequate, or inaccessible. Tenants who speak out about poor conditions risk eviction, and they need landlord references for their next place. People working multiple jobs just to pay rent don’t have time for city council meetings, or for surveys and questionnaires that lead nowhere. When people have no way to participate in decisions about their own housing, they feel abandoned by government. This creates a vacuum that rightwing populism is perfectly designed to fill.
Which brings us back to democracy’s promise. Can it be a democracy when a place to live is governed not by human beings and their needs but by financial firms and profit, pricing people out of their homes and onto the streets? Around the world, people are forcing that question into the open.
In Madrid, 87-year-old María del Carmen Abascal (better known as Maricarmen) had lived in the same flat for 71 years when the investment firm that owns it demanded she pay €2,650 (£2,280) a month instead of €500. On 23 September, after earlier attempts had been blocked, police cleared hundreds of her neighbors from the doorway and she was evicted. That evening, thousands took to the streets of Madrid. Within days there were tens of thousands, a protest camp had filled the Puerta del Sol square, and demonstrations had spread to cities across the country.
Six days after the eviction, the Spanish government passed emergency decrees extending rental contracts and shielding vulnerable tenants from eviction. People called it the “Maricarmen decree.” Three days later, parliament struck it down. The parties of the right had voted against it, one of them calling automatic lease renewal an “expropriation of property rights.” Maricarmen passed away not long after.
In Berlin in 2021, more than one million people—59.1% of valid votes—backed a referendum to bring the homes owned by the city’s largest corporate landlords into public ownership. The result was non-binding, and successive governments have ignored it. So Berliners used the one tool they had, blunt as it was. On 20 September this year, Die Linke, which had campaigned on the promise to carry out the referendum, won the state elections and became the largest party in the city’s parliament for the first time. One day later, before a government had even been formed, Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, announced that he would fast-track a national law banning the “expropriation” of housing. Berliners had voted for a change in economic policy on housing, and the chancellor then made it clear that this was not theirs to decide.
But the movement had known better than to rely on the broken promise of democracy. Last year, it wrote an expropriation law itself, so that it could be passed by a willing government—or, failing that, put to a second, binding vote. In its own words: “Allet mussma selba machn”—we have to do everything ourselves.
That is what it takes to reclaim democracy.
Leilani Farha is the 2026 CBC Massey lecturer. This piece is based on her new book: Housing Inc.: A Global Takeover and Our Fight for Home. She is the former UN special rapporteur on adequate housing and the global director of the international human rights organisation, The Shift.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs The Global Housing Crisis and Democracy Leilani Farhas Warning
Beginner Questions
What is the global housing crisis
Housing has become unaffordable in many countries at once Rents and prices are rising much faster than incomes leaving millions unable to find decent affordable homes
Who is Leilani Farha
She is a former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to housing She spent years documenting housing problems worldwide and now leads The Shift an organization that promotes housing as a human right
What does she mean when she says the crisis is now global
She means its no longer limited to poor countries or big cities Wealthy nations like Canada the UK and Australia are seeing the same problems soaring rents homelessness and housing treated as an investment rather than a home
Why does she call our nations undemocratic
Because governments often ignore what most citizens want and need Policies tend to favor investors developers and wealthy homeowners over renters and people struggling to afford housingeven when most voters want affordable homes
Is housing a human right
Yes International law including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes adequate housing as part of the right to an adequate standard of living
Intermediate Questions
What are the main causes of the crisis
Common causes include financialization speculative buying shortterm rentals like Airbnb stagnant wages and governments cutting public housing
What does financialization of housing mean
Its when housing is bought and sold like stocks Big investors private equity firms and real estate funds treat homes as assets to profit from which drives up prices and pushes ordinary buyers and renters out
How does treating housing as an investment hurt democracy
It shifts government priorities When politicians protect property values and investor profits instead of ensuring affordable homes ordinary people lose influence over decisions that affect their daily lives
What are some examples of this happening
In cities like Vancouver London and Berlin foreign investment and empty luxury units have pushed locals out In Spain and Ireland private equity firms bought up housing after the 2008 crash raising rents sharply
What practical solutions exist
Building more public and social housing rent controls taxes on vacant and speculative properties limits on shortterm rentals and stronger legal protections for tenants
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