Colonialism at the roots of our housing crisis

Many Montrealers have been pushed out of Montreal's housing market, as they're unable to afford a home themselves. This issue is not limited to just Montreal, but affects Canadians across the country.

Ricardo Tranjan, senior economist with the CCPA's Ontario office, said most racialized people and families didn’t expect to afford a home. He says the mainstream media has put attention on those from white middle class families now not being able to afford a home.

For many, buying a home is an investment, one they hope they can cash in on in years or decades. But some are simply trying to seek a permanent roof over their head and escape renovictions, neglected apartments and rising rents.

"Housing market was never welcoming or supportive of large share of families," said Tranjan. He added that throughout history, workers and families had a hard time accessing housing. He said there's nothing necessarily super dramatic about our times preventing people from accessing housing, stating that housing has been a notorious sociopolitical economic point for some time.

Issues within our housing market aren't anything new: they were created during colonization, when the use of land moved from living off of it to profiting off of it. 

Tranjan says this is the overall approach to land, which is seen as a private property. He said colonialism, in classic marxist terms, is appropriating land before you can own it through the means of force. Canada a classic example, the first phase of primitive accumulation as marxists would call it." He added that land was turned into private good, traded, then viewed as a financial asset.

He said land and housing has drifted away from other uses, such as supporting our life and our community.