The Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives Throws Tenants Under the Bus
The Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives Throws Tenants Under the Bus
William Walter Kay
The three primary factors of production (land, labour and capital) each cleave classes from society which in turn host manifold social movements promoting rival economic orders. Tranjan’s The Tenant Class does the bidding of the landed interest, albeit in working class costume.
Ricardo Tranjan is one of fifty staffers at the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). After getting his PhD from Waterloo (on federal government scholarship) Tranjan taught at universities in Ontario and Quebec before being chosen to manage the City of Toronto’s Poverty Reduction Strategy. Tranjan regularly attends housing/poverty policy fora, and he’s often tapped by English and French mainstream media to discuss related topics.
Tranjan’s The Tenant Class (2023) was instigated and funded by the Donnelly Foundation. CCPA threw its organizational capacity behind the book. Toronto’s Between the Lines published it, with financing from federal and provincial government agencies. The Tenant Class sports nine celebrity endorsements, including two from sitting MPs.
While some endorsers clearly never read the text, others, like authors Linda McQuaig and Leslie Kern, definitely got the memo. McQuaig proclaims:
“Tranjan reveals that there is no ‘housing crisis’.”
Kern imparts:
“The Tenant Class makes a compelling case for pushing back against the idea of a housing crisis...”
The book appeared alongside a Walrus article by Tranjan titled “There is no Housing Crisis.” The book’s intro is titled: “The Housing Crisis That Isn’t.” On page 2 Tranjan shouts:
“…there is no actual ‘housing crisis.’ That’s right – there is no crisis.”
The text is freighted with phrases like “the so-called housing crisis” and “the alleged housing crisis.” Tranjan finds “the “housing crisis” narrative” to be “inaccurate, misleading and unhelpful.”
For a definition of “crisis” Tranjan summons the UN to whom “humanitarian crisis” means:
“…an event or series of events that represents a critical threat to the health, safety, security, or well-being of a community or other large group of people usually over a wider area.”
Canada’s rental situation is destroying the lives of millions of people through homelessness and the dread of homelessness; through forced cohabitation in vermin-infested hovels; and, through food and energy poverty wrought by unprecedented rents. This fits the UN definition.
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Tranjan bases his denialism on a laughably feeble pseudo-left argument, to wit:
“Canada’s “housing crisis” is a permanent state of affairs.”
“There is no “housing crisis,” just good old landlords squeezing high rents from tenants.”
“A housing system that serves all but one group is not in crisis; it is one based on structural inequality and economic exploitation.”
He’s saying because the landlord-tenant relationship is inherently exploitative there is no crisis. Exploitative social systems are exempt from crises. This, from a self-proclaimed Marxist!?!
Tranjan correctly points out that the current situation isn’t a crisis for landlords. They’re rolling in cash.
By way of analogy let’s contemplate a famine. (Tellingly, Tranjan deletes “famine” from the UN’s list of crises.) Imagine a country enduring food shortages such that a quarter of its population is starving. At the same time farmers and grocers reap banner profits from inflated food prices. According to Tranjan’s nonsense there is no crisis because some people profit from the famine.
Landlords don’t see a crisis. Tenants do. CCPA sees no crisis. One could trip over the class line.
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Tranjan seems aware of what is happening in Canada’s rental market and he drops useful, albeit dated, data detailing how rents have rocketed passed inflation rates and wage raises. He’s current to 2021. Rents have spiked 20% since!
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) has never recorded rental markets this tight. By every metric rents have never been this high. Tenants have never faced such hard times. Tranjan’s business-as-usual, nothing-to-see-here-folks contention contradicts official stats and tenants’ lived experiences.
I’ve shown Tranjan’s work to struggling tenants. They’re not just astounded by the denialism; they’re offended by it.
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Why is the CCPA lying about Canada’s housing situation?
Their agenda isn’t hidden. One book endorser, Green Party MP Mike Morris, spells it out:
“…every time someone tells me that we just need to build more housing, I’ll tell them to read The Tenant Class.”
Tranjan stresses that persons saying “housing crisis” invariably call for housing supply increases:
“Real estate lobbyists and some housing experts argue the problem is that supply is not catching up with demand. If we build more housing, the argument goes, people will have more choices and rent will be cheaper. The main problem with the “supply side” argument is that it is not true.”
Tranjan posits two reasons why laws of supply and demand don’t apply to housing; the first:
“…land, on which housing is built, is a fixed resource…. Highly desirable land – be it downtown Toronto building lots or prairie farmland – is fixed in quantity and scarce. There is little of it.”
Canada isn’t Monaco. Among industrialized countries Canada’s sparsity is bested only by Australia’s. Every Canadian city is besieged by sprawling, yet habitable, greenspace and farmland. Inside every Canadian city one finds copious parks, conservation areas, university endowment lands and city-owned golf and country clubs. The land scarcity myth is a key instrumentality of the lords.
Tranjan’s second brilliancy:
“Another important difference between real-world rental markets and the law of supply and demand taught by Economics 101 is that housing is not bananas. Bananas spoil quickly…”
So, non-perishable goods aren’t subject to laws of supply and demand! The prices of diamonds and gold don’t fluctuate according to supply and demand!?! Ridiculous!
Scrounging for empirical evidence, Tranjan mentions that during Covid the national vacancy rate rose 1% yet rents continued climbing. This anomalous blip is explained by the temporary disappearance of the short-term rental market, and by the fact that many tenants were flush with Covid cash.
Grasping further for examples of increasing supply accompanying increasing rents Tranjan cherry-picks events in Montreal and Toronto in 2020, but then defeats himself by admitting this abnormality was caused by landlords offering one-month rent discounts. Viewed over the duration of the lease this was a lowering, not an increasing, of rent.
Tranjan’s star witness, “prominent housing expert” Professor Steve Pomeroy, claims:
“…between 2006 and 2016, Canada added 1.636 million households and built 1.919 million new homes… almost 30,000 extra homes were constructed each year compared to the increase in the number of households.’ And yet housing prices and rents went up a breakneck speed during those years.”
Pomeroy’s article doesn’t mention rent. It deals with purchases of detached houses. Pomeroy focuses on the demolishing of old houses on urban lots, and their replacement with new houses. Astoundingly, he doesn’t subtract demolished and abandoned houses from the inventory of houses. What matters to the market is overall supply, not just the number of new units. If one subtracts demolished/abandoned houses from total supply then household growth between 2006 and 2016 exceeded housing supply growth. Argument demolished.
Along with his single-ledger accounting, Pomeroy compares apples to oranges. New houses cost more than old ones. His article is another tawdry exercise in anti-development sophism.
Tranjan’s own effort to pull a fast one comes during his discussion of a 1948 book by CMHC researcher Humphry Carver:
“…Carver tackled the “supply-side” argument head on: “it would be foolish to imagine that the combined effect of all the known economies of production would be sufficient to invalidate the main conclusion at which we have arrived, namely that the economic market cannot by itself fulfil the housing needs of the Canadian people.”
Carver’s quote doesn’t tackle “supply.” The problem with markets vis-à-vis residential rentals is that a substantial portion of the citizenry, being underemployed or unemployable, cannot consistently pay rent. The private sector cannot house these people.
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Tranjan conflates “developer” with “landlord.” In reality, the construction industry perpetually clashes with landlords. While a few construction firms build then rent, typically they build then sell. Probably less than 1% of Canada’s rental units are owned by the persons who built them. Construction industry spokespeople relentlessly complain about lack of access to land. The landed estate wants as little new land as possible brought to market. On this decisive issue these two sectors are diametrically opposed.
The Greater Vancouver Regional District’s greenspaces cover three times the area zoned residential. The adjacent Agricultural Land Reserve spans 27,000 square kilometers. The Greenbelt north of Metro Toronto is thirteen times the size of the City of Toronto. Only brain-dead suckers believe these humongous, market-warping enclosures exist to conserve wildlife and soil. Their purpose is propping up property prices, …and rents.
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The libertarian solution to the housing crisis is “liberate the land” i.e., rescind zoning bylaws and other regulatory artifices blocking construction industry access to land. Some contend that should we ever see a free market in land (and we never have) landlordism would disappear.
The socialist solution to the housing crisis is to construct state-owned, low-cost units on public land; i.e., three-story walk-ups, twelve per hectare, as far as the eye can see. Building on private property multiplies costs and jacks-up land prices. There’s also a strong fiscal case for housing government assistance recipients in state-owned housing. To do otherwise is to shovel taxpayer money at slumlords.
Canada could implement both solutions simultaneously.
To the landed estate there is no housing crisis. They fear a feeding frenzy on underutilized land. Their solution involves dispatching legions of professor-wannabees into the tenants’ cultural space to spread pseudo-left psychobabble about “decommodification” and “gentrification.” Enter the CCPA…