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 swivelled 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 experienced by ordinary people around the world: the growing conviction that the housing system is no longer tethered 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 station 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 decoupled the price of housing from what ordinary people earn. They’ve transformed our homes into a toy for wealthy investors. I call this alliance Housing Inc.
The tools available to the large financial actors driving and profiting from the housing crisis are not available to the rest of us. They hire armies of lobbyists to squash rent-control laws. They fund political campaigns. They rotate 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 held to 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 who bought Greek property. Thousands did – not to live there, but to convert apartments into short-term rentals, banking on Greece’s tourism industry as a good investment. As foreign capital flooded in, long-term housing became scarcer, rents spiked and neighbourhoods such as Exarchia and Koukaki began to change beyond recognition.Athenians protested and their government responded by sending in the riot police and steamrollering dissent to defend its decisions.
What’s on offer in terms of genuine civic engagement for the people most affected by the housing crisis tends to be defanged, inadequate or inaccessible. Tenants who speak out about poor conditions risk eviction, and they need landlord references for their next place. People holding down multiple jobs just to pay their rent don’t have time for city council meetings, or surveys and questionnaires that lead nowhere. When people have no means 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 asMaricarmen) 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 neighbours 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 take 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.
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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
