Housing Inc.

A Global Takeover and Our Fight For Home

The housing industry has become a new kind of empire. It’s up to us to save humanity and take back home. 


“This book is a fierce systemic reckoning that is also a profound feat of storytelling, peerlessly authoritative, while disarmingly tender. Yet it is even more than that: it dares to ask what our society would look like if love for other humans were an obligation of lawmaking, and if respect and imagination were values of public policy …

Housing Inc. is easily among the very best works of non-fiction I've ever read.”

- Saeed Teebi, Author of You Will Not Kill Our Imagination and Her First Palestinian

“A gorgeously written, mind and heart-expanding treatise from one of the world’s experts on housing. You’ll never look at shelter in the same way. Absolutely essential reading.”

— Astra Taylor, Author of Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone and The Age of Insecurity

Pre-order Housing Inc. Now

Canada


Available from any book seller

Pre-order from an indie bookstore near you →

The USA

Available from any book seller

Pre-order from an indie bookstore near you →

Outside of Canada and the USA

Shipping fees will apply

Pre-order from Canadian independent bookstore, Perfect Books →

Leilani Farha has been in more homes than most people will ever visit—a four-door sedan in San Diego, a lean-to by railway tracks in Lagos, a windowless motel room in Paris, a tent on a Toronto beach. What people tell her first is never that they need housing, it’s that they want to be treated like human beings. Housing Inc. explains why they have to ask.

Housing has become a crisis of humanity—one created by design and decades in the making.

Writing from the centre of global housing debates, Farha reckons with a crisis four decades in the making, engineered by dictators, presidents, and prime ministers, and perfected by the financial firms that turn homes into sites of extraction. The same logic that justifies dispossessing Indigenous Peoples of their lands and resources now prices out a generation, displaces tenants, destroys communities, and disappears homeless people.

This crisis of humanity plays out in every country in the world. With fierce clarity, Farha argues that the fight for home requires not just better policy, but a different ideology altogether—one rooted in law, humanity, and imagination—where every person counts.


Events

Upcoming talks and lectures

Sept. 8, Koerner Hall, Toronto, ON (Massey Lecture)

Sept. 12, Neptune Theatre, Halifax, NS (Massey Lecture)

Oct. 1, Northern Arts and Cultural Centre, Yellowknife, NWT (Massey Lecture)

Oct. 22 and Oct. 23, York Theatre, Vancouver, BC (Massey Lecture)

Oct. 29, National Arts Centre, Ottawa, ON (Massey Lecture)

All Massey Lecture Tickets can be purchased here.

Pre-Sale Tickets for Massey Lectures are 20% off between July 6 - 13th 2026


Featured Podcast

The housing industry has become a new kind of empire, says 2026 CBC Massey Lecturer

Housing has become a crisis of humanity — one created by design and decades in the making, says this year's CBC Massey Lecturer Leilani Farha, who served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing from 2014 to 2020.

Pre-order Housing Inc. Now


Canada

Available from any book seller

Pre-order from an indie bookstore near you →

The USA

Available from any book seller

Pre-order from an indie bookstore near you →

Outside of Canada and the USA

Shipping fees will apply

Pre-order from Canadian independent bookstore, Perfect Books →