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I learned that my Montreal apartment building had been purchased by an investment firm in July 2023. The building had previously been owned by a family, who did not go to great lengths to maintain the building, but also did not raise the rent significantly during the time that I lived there under their ownership. Historically rental housing in Montreal has been more affordable than that in other major Canadian cities.
Over the last decade though, the housing affordability crisis that was once associated primarily with cities like Toronto and Vancouver has spread to communities across the country. According to the Regroupement des comités logement et associations de locataires du Québec, in Montreal, average rents increased 27% between 2020 and 2024 (). In other Quebec communities, these increases have been even more significant. The dynamics in Quebec are reflective of a global housing crisis in which a growing number of people are enduring domicide, living in informal arrangements or experiencing homelessness, while others are forced to endure poor housing conditions and high rents or high debt burdens to maintain their housing.
In my building, the new landlord immediately got to work at increasing the return on their investment. They pursued an 8% rent increase for all units – higher than the 3.3% increase suggested by the Tribunal administratif du logement for that year. They began to demolish and remodel the vacant units, including the basement unit below us and the unit above. Their demolition required a lot of brute force and at one point a concrete slab crashed through the ceiling of a neighbour’s bathroom. When they completed the renovations, they listed the units at nearly double the rent that we paid for a unit of the same size.
This anecdote is just one dispatch of how tenants are under pressure in the context of a global housing crisis where housing is increasingly understood as an asset class or investment product. Mainstream explanations of the housing crisis understand the crisis as one of supply and demand – there are too few housing units, and too many people trying to access them. From this logic comes policies to curtail immigration and subsidize the private sector to build more housing units. These explanations rest on an assumption that housing is best distributed through the private market. They ignore a key tension that sociologist David Madden and urban planner Peter Marcuse remind us of: between the profit-generating potential of housing as a commodity and the social value that we ascribe to housing as home – a universally necessary refuge from the outside world that is a precondition for participation in other areas of social, economic and political life. If generating profit through housing is prioritized over the social value that we ascribe to housing, a universal right to housing cannot be realized and our housing affordability crisis cannot be curtailed.
To prioritize the social value we ascribe to housing, housing will need to be understood as a public utility rather than an investment vehicle. In the last century in North America, we have seen massive public housing construction projects, and we should not preclude new and significant investment in public housing as a political possibility. At the same time, we must curtail the profit that can be derived in the private housing market, and address income inequality more broadly, distributing money back to workers, so that workers can retire with dignity without relying on their inflated home values. If we can come to understand housing as a public utility rather than an asset-class, a life sustaining housing future is possible.
Sophie O’Manique is a Doctoral candidate in Geography at the Graduate Centre of the City university of New York
