Housing, Inc.: A Global Takeover and Our Fight for Home
Leilani Farha
We are pleased to announce Housing, Inc.: A Global Takeover and Our Fight for Home by Leilani Farha as the 2026 CBC Massey Lecture, presented in partnership with House of Anansi Press and CBC.
Leilani Farha has been in more homes than most people will ever visit: a four-door sedan in San Diego, a lean to beside railway tracks in Lagos, a windowless motel room in Paris, and a tent on a Toronto beach. Across these spaces, she encounters a recurring truth. People do not begin by saying they need housing. They begin by saying they want to be treated like human beings. Housing, Inc. asks why that dignity has become so difficult to secure.
Writing from the centre of global housing debates, Farha traces a crisis more than four decades in the making, shaped by governments and financial systems that have transformed housing into a site of extraction. The same logic that has long dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their lands now underpins a global system that prices out young people, displaces tenants, fractures communities, and renders homelessness invisible.
This crisis, Farha argues, is not isolated but global, playing out in every country in the world. In Housing, Inc., she makes a compelling case that addressing it requires more than incremental policy change. It demands a fundamental shift in ideology toward a framework rooted in human rights, law, and imagination, where every person counts and the meaning of home is reclaimed.
Leilani Farha is the Global Director of The Shift, an international human rights organization focused on housing, finance, and climate. She previously served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing and is recognized globally as a leading expert on housing and human rights. A lawyer, advocate, and speaker, she has visited hundreds of people across six continents in a wide range of living conditions from homeless encampments to informal settlements to private homes. She is based in Ottawa, Canada.
This year’s lectures will be presented in Toronto, Halifax, Yellowknife, Vancouver, and Ottawa. Tickets are now available. Previous CBC Massey Lectures are available through the CBC Archive, or in print through House of Anansi Press.
