This is tonight! Join us for our last online event of 2020 and a talk about the financialization of rental housing! You can RSVP here: eventbrite.ca/e/big-landlord…
August: Financialization of rental housing began in the '90s due to: fed gov withdrawal from funding social housing, deregulation by prov gov of tenant protection laws (introduce vacancy decontrol, above guideline rent increases), new financial instruments for investors
August: Combination of these factors = Dream scenario for landlords, nightmare scenario for tenants
August: As of 2020, financialized landlords own ~20% of Canada's rental housing stock 
August: Landlords increase profits by lowering costs and increasing revenues. This often means cutting spending on maintenance and driving rents (guideline increases + AGIs) and finding new revenue streams (parking, laundry, submetering utilities).
August: Often this is done through aggressive strategies of repositioning buildings and the mass displacement of rent-controlled tenants. One landlord described it as 'putting the building through a carwash.'
August: Ultimately, this profit strategy is based on the displacement and dispossession of working-class people from their homes.
August: Canadian financialized landlords also investing in new frontiers: secondary markets (small and mid sized cities), Northern communities, even trailer parks.
August: Examples from groups like @ParkdaleOrg @KeepYourRent show that working-class people are resisting and fighting to hold onto their homes and defend their neighbourhoods by going on rent strike, exposing the pandemic "eviction blitz" at the Landlord Tenant Board, etc
Lewis: Under financialization: housing is valued for its exchange value as an investment rather than its use value as a home
Lewis: Many apartment buildings west Toronto have been purchased in recent years by financialized landlords incl. Starlight, Timbercreek, Great West Life, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Minto
Lewis: Spike in transactions in 2015. Many of these transactions done in partnership with Blackstone Group, the largest landlord in the world.
(Blackstone's subsidiary Invitation Homes purchased many of the 'distressed' single family homes in the US following the 2008 crisis.)
Lewis: Many of Canada's public sector pension funds are investing in real estate. Also university endowments. For example, the University of Toronto Asset Management Corporation which has large investments in Blackstone.
Lewis: Financialized landlords employ a 'squeezing' strategy to get ever more money from their tenants. Done through continual rent increases (guideline and above-guideline increases), demanding additional charges for things previously included in rent, etc
Lewis: Another strategy is 'value add' through repositioning of buildings -- usually in gentrifying neighbourhoods. Cosmetic changes that improve the curb appeal of buildings in order to attract higher-income households. Pressure in-place tenants to move & flip units on turnover.
Lewis: For example, this building on Eglinton West was renovated upon purchase by Starlight.
Lewis: A third strategy is through infill development -- chopping up 2- and 3-bed units in to 1-beds and bachelors to "intensify" buildings. As well as new construction of buildings on green spaces next to existing high-rises.
Lewis: All of has severe impacts on working-class, racialized people living in some of the few remaining affordable neighbourhoods left in Toronto.
Lewis: What are some ways to address this crisis? Some ideas on this slide. For example, city of Berlin spend $1B last year to intervene to purchase and block the sale of this apartment building to a financialized landlord.
Risager: Case study of class composition and recomposition under financialization: A rent strike by working-class, racialized, immigrant tenants in east Hamilton, Ontario against landlord Interrent Real Estate Investment Trust in 2018.
Risager: Did participant-action research with the Stoney Creek Towers Tenant Committee and the Hamilton Tenants Solidarity Network during the strike. Paper includes interviews with tenants involved in the strike.
Risager: Takes inspiration from Italian autonomist organizing & theory in the '70s. Mario Tronti: Organize workers' (or tenants') individual alienation and pessimism into mass refusal. Move from technical composition to political composition.
Risager: Technical composition of tenants under financialized rental housing
Risager: Political composition of tenants during the rent strike
Risager: Mass refusal by tenants against displacement can be a new form of class struggle to reclaim the city.
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