Leilani Farha, Global Director of The Shift and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, has been appointed the 2026 Massey Lecturer. Her cross-Canada lecture tour in September and October will draw from her upcoming book, Housing, Inc.: A Global Takeover and Our Fight for Home, to be published this fall by Anansi Press.
As a leading housing rights advocate, Farha argues that the global housing crisis was deliberately constructed by an alliance of governments, banks, and financial firms, and that it can be dismantled. Housing, Inc. exposes four decades of policy choices that turned homes into financial assets, pricing out a generation. From a car in San Diego to a lean-to in Lagos, a motel room in Paris to a tent on a Toronto beach, Farha traces how the same logic that dispossessed Indigenous Peoples now displaces tenants and destroys communities.
“Tenants and people experiencing homelessness are being sacrificed — driven out of their homes, while financial firms, backed by governments, watch their profits soar,” Farha said. “It has never been clearer who counts in this world and who doesn’t. This is not just a housing crisis. It is a crisis of humanity, and of democracy itself.”
The book goes beyond diagnosis. Farha contends that fixing the housing crisis requires more than better policy; it demands a reckoning. “We keep treating this as a market problem with a market solution,” said Julieta Perucca, Co-Founder and Deputy Director of The Shift. “Leilani’s book makes the case that it’s a problem of ideology — and that communities, not financial firms, need to be driving the answers.”
“Governments, banks, and financial firms have built a longstanding alliance — they are Housing Inc. They are powerful, and they move as one. But we can take housing back if we connect, collaborate, and fight together in the name of home.”
To that end, Farha and The Shift will launch a national campaign in September to challenge who holds power and influence over housing in Canada. Farha will deliver the 2026 Massey Lectures across Canada in September and October. Housing, Inc. will be available wherever books are sold.
SOURCE The Shift
