Tenant Resistance to the Myth of “Supply and Demand”

By Fred Burrill

This post is part of the Tenants’ Collective Responses to Housing Crises across Canada series.

One of capitalism’s most powerful myths is that of supply and demand. Take housing, for instance. We’re told by policymakers that the current desperate situation facing tenants in major Canadian cities is due to increased immigration: in the words of outgoing Quebec Premier François Legault, “In Montreal, we have exceeded our welcoming capacity.”

In a majority-tenant city experiencing the financial crunch of skyrocketing rents, framing the issue this way has obvious repercussions for the well-being and safety of migrants and other people of colour in Montreal. It also conveniently hides the fact that housing costs are the manifestation of structural power relations and not naturally occurring phenomena. In other words, housing is a terrain of struggle between those who own property and those who are forced to pay for the privilege of a roof over their heads. In the zero-sum game of capitalist urban planning, the space for working-class life shrinks as the space for profit-making is enlarged.

Activists in Montreal have been warning for decades that rising rents are the by-product of an active collaboration between developers, landlords, and municipal officials. When I interviewed long-time housing organizer Christina Xydous about opposing gentrification in the working-class neighbourhood of Saint-Henri back in the early 2000s, she argued for the need to look under the hood of supposedly consumer-driven urban transformations:

I see a lot of focus on, an anger against like, artists and students moving into a neighbourhood as like the stormtroopers of gentrification. And it’s not that that isn’t true. It’s that, it’s not quite so ephemeral a process. What they weren’t looking at, and I think what is the real driver of gentrification, for me, is the amount of money made available by all levels of government, including the city government, specifically for gentrifying the neighbourhood. This was a plan! This wasn’t a random, like, suddenly people thought Saint-Henri was cool. This was a concerted effort on the part of City officials and developers! They saw cheap land, large tracts of it, right? A lot of it available for the taking …. and the City made those funds available! They also made special funds available to property owners for renovating their dwellings, and giving them, like, much greater percentages of the overall cost of the renovation than you would get for any other area in the city. They were incentivizing in other words, renovate your homes, and that might sound good, especially when you consider how terrible the stock of housing was there, but the subsidies were that you had to live in the apartment, you weren’t, it wasn’t available for you if it was just a rental unit that you owned, you had to reside in the apartment to be able to access that surplus of subsidies, to renovate. So, you’re inciting them, you’re giving them, financial incentive, to take over those dwellings from people who were tenants! All of this was deliberate! None of this was happenstance![i]

Behind this vicious turn-of-the-century class war over urban space lay an even deeper transformation in ruling relations, as industrial capital abandoned inner-city North American neighbourhoods like Saint-Henri in order to give way to financialized real-estate interests. Working-class organizers fought this transition tooth and nail. When, in 1988, McGill University bought an abandoned plant on the formerly industrial Lachine Canal to convert into high-priced student housing, local grassroots organizations like the POPIR (Projet d’organisation populaire, d’information et de regroupement) and welfare rights group ODAS (Organisation d’aide aux sans-emplois) warned that Saint-Henri was going to become a “neighbourhood for sale,” and that converting industrial zones to residential would drive up land prices and make social development even more dependent on private capital.[ii] They were right – as major hedge funds poured billions into the Canal, property values in the neighbourhood increased by 117% between 1996 and 2006. In the same period, rents rose by almost 30%.[iii]

Despite all the hot air about the current “housing crisis,” then, it’s an inaccurate moniker for a situation designed and fostered to increase capitalist profit margins. Tapping into the history of working-class tenant struggle, further, should help us to see that there will be no straightforward policy solution to a problem that is essentially about capitalist consolidation of control over urban space. We will need to rely on own autonomous movements that seek to build counter-power and working-class capacity, taking back control over housing and all the means of reproducing life and community in less exploitative and destructive ways.

Fred Burrill is a long-time housing organizer in Montreal. He is also currently an Assistant Professor of Historical Studies at the University of New Brunswick. He is working on a book entitled Neighbourhood for Sale: History, Memory, and Struggle in the Remaking of Saint-Henri, Montreal.

fred.burrill@unb.ca

@fburrill.bsky.social

Resources

1. https://locataire.info/
2. Talking Violence: Oral Histories of Displacement and Resistance in Saint-Henri
3. High, Steven. Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022.
4. Gaudreau, Louis. Le promoteur, la banque et le rentier: fondements et évolution du logement capitaliste. Montréal: Lux éditeur, 2020.

[i] Christina Xydous, interviewed by Fred Burrill, 9 September 2018.

[ii] Jean-Pierre Wilsey, NON à la fermeture de nos quartiers; pas de Schefferville dans le Sud-Ouest,” Vie ouvrière 29, 2 (August 1989): 24-26.

[iii] Louis Gaudreau, Marc-André Houle, and Gabriel Fauveaud, “L’action des promoteurs immobiliers dans le processus de gentrification du Sud-Ouest de Montréal,” Recherches sociographiques 62, no. 1 (2021): 121-147.