Rethinking housing insecurity: Property relations and domicide in settler colonial Canada

The word “crisis” has come to define the housing field in Canada; that is, housing is being defined by crises that embody the institution of shelter. There simultaneously exists a housing shortage crisis, a real estate bubble, and a crisis of housing affordability. These forms of crises have dominated headlines and political party platforms in recent years. However, public discourse surrounding the housing field is predominantly focused on homeownership and the ability or not of Canadians to purchase a house. But what about renter households? In Canada, around one-third of households are renters, representing over 5 million people (Statistics Canada, 2022a). Tenants face a more precarious housing situation because their shelter is dependent upon their landlord and property owner. With skyrocketing rents (Patel, 2022), income inequality (Statistics Canada, 2022b), and the erosion of below-market rental units (Fung et al., n.d.; Pomeroy, 2020, 2021), renter households—particularly those in gentrifying areas—are more likely to experience housing insecurity. Soederberg (2018) has described the steady rise of rates of evictions as the “silent social tsunami of our times” (p.286). Health and economic emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic render the eviction tide less silent, and moreover unveil the precarity that lower-income rental households face, as thousands were evicted from their homes in Canada in 2020 (August, 2021; Crosby, 2021). Those who are displaced are often unable to find shelter at equivalent rents, with increased lack of access to affordable rental housing in urban centers. The crisis of housing insecurity for renter households is given far less attention compared to the plight of existing or potential homeowners. Instead, home ownership is often touted as the only solution to rental housing insecurity, contributing to housing discrimination and inequality. The crisis of rental housing insecurity is not accidental, but instead a product of social conditions, housing policies, the political landscape, and the general composition and trajectory of a settler society. Canada is a settler society that continues to develop and attempts to perpetuate itself on stolen Indigenous land. The pinnacle of success in settler colonial Canada is to own property; that is, to own a piece of stolen or treatied Indigenous land. The evolution of the Canadian state as a settler colony has revolved around the expropriation of Indigenous territory and its conversion into real estate for the purposes of settlement and resource extraction. This is how Canada and many Canadians have and continue to accumulate wealth. The incessant drive for homeownership in the Canadian psyche is not some naturally occurring phenomenon, but instead a result of consistent government policies over many decades. The federal government in particular has incentivized and encouraged homeownership and the construction of single-detached homes. One result is that Canada has become what has been described as a “nation of landlords”, with around one in six Canadians owning more than one property (Better Dwelling, 2022). Landlords are able to accumulate wealth through relations of property and the ownership of land. As the improvement of property is a core tenet of settler colonization, tenants face the inescapable risk of being displaced if their landlord wishes to convert, reposition, renovate, or demolish their building. Tenants—especially lower-income people and others in society that are marginalized—face precarity and housing insecurity through the social and material relations of property. A useful way to think about housing crises in Canada is in relation to settler colonial property relations and domicide—a term that geographers Porteous and Smith (2001) have coined to associate with the destruction of home. Domicide denotes the unmaking of home and is typically characterized by its repressive elements. Porteous and Smith (2001) define domicide as “the deliberate destruction of home by human agency in pursuit of specified goals, which causes suffering to the victims” (p.12). While it is largely geographers who have contributed to scholarly work on domicide, the concept is ripe for sociological analysis—with which I engage using a socio-spatial approach to examine both the repressive and reproductive elements of domicide as the unmaking and remaking of home (Baxter & Brickell, 2014; Nowicki, 2017). Moreover, domicide is a useful framework to examine and critique the unmaking and remaking of home through a settler colonial lens. Engaging with domicide as a socio-spatial process of home unmaking opens up scholarly space to examine domicide in relation to policies, processes, and institutions surrounding eviction, displacement, and dispossession in settler societies. This includes approaching property relations, urban development, and housing/homeownership as driven by settler colonial logics of acquiring Indigenous lands for the exclusive benefit of settler society, and the role of domicide in the production and reproduction of space. Some scholarly work has embraced the notion of domicide to examine the Canadian government's willful destruction of Indigenous homes and homelands as part of a systemic and ongoing process of settler colonialism. These include Donnan's (2016) argument that domicide contributes to deteriorating housing conditions and Indigenous homelessness, and Basso et al. (2020) conceptualization of “cumulative domicide” to challenge the idea of domicide as an event. Instead, they argue, domicide is perpetrated steadily over time and space, where Indigenous peoples are displaced from their homelands and prevented from remaking home on their terms. Domicide is first enacted with the appropriation of Indigenous land for resource development and settler urbanization. As settler societies establish in rural and urbanizing environments, settler colonial property relations strive to constantly improve space and perfect real estate to maximize the exchange value of land. A driving force of settler colonialism is the attempted conversion of and reconfiguration of property for the highest and best settler use. Herein lies settler colonialism's domicidal violence; it targets Indigenous populations, their land, as well as those subjects—typically racialized, immigrant/refugee, and lower-income populations—who are not the idealized Western subject. Settler property relations relegate Indigenous people, lower-income and racialized populations to the margins of housing tenureship—such as rental housing that is more likely to be unaffordable, inadequate, and unsuitable. Within the hierarchy of housing tenureship, homeowners are emphasized at the top while renters and social tenants occupy the bottom (Nowicki, 2018). Within the hierarchy of housing tenureship, homeownership is esteemed as the pinnacle of settler success, to own a piece of Indigenous land. Renter households, on the other hand, are more likely to be subjected to housing insecurity and displacement due to the crises and conditions created and perpetuated under property relations in settler societies. Housing and the material conditions necessary for shelter to be realized—those being land, property, and real estate—should be considered in relation to settler colonialism and domicide. Housing in settler societies is predicated on domicide, in that settlement and development rely on the destruction of Indigenous homelands and the attempted dispossession and containment of Indigenous peoples in order to produce property and wealth for settlers. I emphasize “attempted” because settler colonialism—and associated domicidal processes—is an incomplete project that has always and continues to be met with Indigenous resistance, from the early moments of settler invasion to contemporary iterations of Indigenous resurgence such as what we have seen with the Land Back movement. It is through this understanding of property and homeownership as methods of wealth accumulation and settler entrenchment that crises of rental housing insecurity are produced and perpetuated. Renter households face a housing insecurity crisis in comparison to the majority population who own their homes in Canada. Rental housing insecurity is fueled by increasing income inequality—with widening gaps in income between homeowners and renters (Fung et al., n.d.). Renter households are much more likely than homeowners to experience core housing need, sometimes referred to as being “housing disadvantaged” (Haider & Moranis, 2020). This means that their homes are either unaffordable, unsuitable, or inadequate (or a combination of the three). With over one in 10 Canadian households experiencing core housing need, renter households are more than three times as likely to be housing disadvantaged compared to homeowners (Statistics Canada, 2022c). Over 77 percent of households are in core housing need in relation to affordability (Statistics Canada, 2022c), and over 27 percent of renter households live in unaffordable dwellings (Statistics Canada, 2022d). Rates of core housing need are highest in apartment buildings and lowest in single-detached houses, and visible minorities are twice as likely to be housing disadvantaged compared to white people (Gibson, 2020; Haider & Moranis, 2020). Indigenous households also experience disproportionate rates of housing insecurity and core housing need. Although 2021 census figures show improvements in core housing need for Indigenous households compared to 2016, Indigenous peoples are more likely to live in unsuitable—or crowded—housing and live in dwellings that require major repairs compared to non-Indigenous populations (Statistics Canada, 2022e). Over one in six Indigenous people live in crowded housing, at 17.1 percent compared to 9.4 percent of non-Indigenous populations, and almost one in six Indigenous people live in a dwelling in need of major repairs, at 16.4 percent compared to 5.7 percent of non-Indigenous populations (Statistics Canada, 2022e). Indigenous and renter households are more likely to experience core housing need, socio-spatial exclusion/racial segregation, and discrimination (Cooper & Skelton, 2015; Suttor, 2015). Racial disparities are central to the crisis of housing security. There are stark disparities in rates of homeownership between white and racialized people in Canada, especially among Black, Indigenous, Arab, and Latin American populations (CMHC, 2021). Black people in particular are more likely to live in rented dwellings relative to the total population, at 52 percent compared to 27 percent (Randle et al., 2021). Visible minorities have less access to affordable housing than white people in Canada, with unaffordable housing rates especially high among people of Middle Eastern, North African, East Asian, and South Asian descent (Choi & Ramaj, 2022). Indigenous and Black renters also experience higher rates of evictions than other segments of the Canadian population (Leon & Iveniuk, 2020; Statistics Canada, 2022f). Exacerbating housing precarity for non-white populations is evidence of growing gaps in income and wealth inequality in Canada (Block et al., 2019). These statistics plus ongoing research point toward an upward, yet systemic, trend in racialized populations facing housing discrimination, spatial segregation, and social exclusion in Canada (Alini, 2020; Centre for Equality Rights in Accommodation et al., 2021; Hulchanski & Maaranen, 2018; Springer, 2021; Wilson et al., 2020). Housing inequality is not a naturally occurring or inevitable phenomenon, and the origins and trajectory of Canada as a settler society help explain how renter households and racialized populations are more likely to experience housing insecurity and discrimination. The wealth of the Canadian state and its citizens is dependent on the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land for the purposes of settlement, resource extraction, and wealth accumulation. The incessant drive for property ownership in Canada is a prominent feature of settler colonialism, long driven by policies that encourage homeownership and the construction of single-detached dwellings amid ongoing attempts of dispossession. The centrality of land, property, and homeownership to settler society cannot be disconnected from understandings of housing crises. A reconsideration and potential reframing of crisis in relation to shelter is required to consider how settler colonial conditions produce and reproduce housing insecurity. Domicide is produced and reproduced through settler colonization. Domicide is produced through the initial attempt at dispossession and displacement/containment, and reproduced within contemporary property relations through the marginalization of renter households. At the same time, domicide maintains its reproductive attributes, in that a key driver of settler society involves the insatiable quest for land and improvement of property for the purposes of accumulating wealth and providing living space for settlers. Settler property relations are inherently racialized in that their foundation is based upon Indigenous dispossession and white emplacement. Property relations are further developed through racist immigration policies and restricted access to land, and perpetuated in the contemporary processes of marginalization of racialized renter households based on their experiences with core housing need, income/wealth inequality, social exclusion, racial segregation, discrimination, and housing insecurity. In essence, settler colonialism's racial order is being replicated in housing. Yet, domicide does not go uncontested. As housing precarity continues to accelerate in Canadian cities, tenant mobilizations are critical to curbing the tide of displacement. Rather than rely on technical, market-oriented solutions to address crises in housing, Madden and Marcuse (2016) instead want us to view the housing system as shaped by wider social conflict between different groups, “a conflict between housing as lived, social space and housing as an instrument for profitmaking—a conflict between housing as home and as real estate” (Madden & Marcuse, 2016, p.4). Key to resistance efforts will be the centering of rent as a political issue and a strong, organized, and radical tenant movement (Stein, 2019). Mobilizing for housing justice—in addition to centering rent as a political issue and organizing, participating in, and supporting radical tenant movements—must also entail foregrounding a decolonial praxis in movement building and tenant organizing. From a settler perspective, it is imperative to foreground Indigenous struggles for self-determination, land defense, and land back. From a sociological perspective, it is crucial to recognize that settler colonial property relations impel housing insecurity.

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