Date:
Author: Alexandre Petitclerc, Ph. D. Candidate in Philosophy, Université de Montréal
Original article: https://theconversation.com/two-evicted-women-tell-their-story-the-landlords-had-no-empathy-245831
When it comes to the housing crisis, little attention is paid to social relations. Understanding this crisis, and thinking about housing justice, requires an understanding of how the increasingly unequal relationships around housing manifest themselves.
As a doctoral candidate in political philosophy at the Université de Montréal, I am interested in the housing crisis from the perspective of socio-economic rights. In my thesis, I show how these rights, particularly the right to housing, are necessary to guarantee just social relations in democracies such as Canada and Québec.
As part of this research, I scripted the short film Losing Your Home, directed by Emmanuel Rioux. The aim of the film was to approach the housing crisis from the point of view of those who suffer from it.
A double task
Losing Your Home is a 20-minute short documentary that tells the stories of the parallel struggles of two Montréalers, Frances Foster and Jeannette Chiasson, both of whom were forced out of their apartments.
(Courtesy of Losing Your Home team), Author provided (no reuse)
Filmed in the spring of 2023, the documentary combines theory and experience: while political philosophy and the social sciences enable us to reflect on access to housing in terms of social justice issues, the work on the documentary, and the generosity of Chiasson and Foster, help us understand the problem through the lived experience of eviction.
I feel it’s necessary to examine the lived experiences of the housing crisis and evictions, in particular, not only to bring stories of injustice into the public arena but also to advance research into the social relationships that operate around housing.
This article is part of our series, ‘Our cities from the past to the future.’ Urban life is going through many transformations, each with cultural, economic, social and political implications. To shed light on these diverse issues, La Conversation Canada and The Conversation Canada are inviting researchers to discuss the current state of our cities.
The social experience of eviction
It has been said repeatedly that real estate is a driving force behind the current increase in socio-economic inequalities. Real estate is an important financial vehicle, both for small owners and for large investment funds.
Obviously, a small owner-occupier with a duplex does not have the same responsibility for the development of the housing market as a transnational real estate company. However, my aim is not to point fingers. It’s to show how certain phenomena, like eviction, are singularly damaging to the “sense of equality” among those who take part in the housing market.
(Courtesy of the Losing Your Home team), Author provided (no reuse)
In the current state of the housing market, homeowners and tenants do not enjoy equal rights and freedoms in relation to their homes. Simply put, an owner doesn’t run the risk of losing his or her living space to someone else.
The problem of eviction reveals considerations that are often overlooked when thinking about housing and its social implications. In particular, I’m interested in the sense of equality between landlord and tenant when the former can force the latter to leave his or her home. Making the documentary enabled me to bring out these philosophical considerations in order to think them through.
The feeling of equality
The approach behind a film like Losing Your Home occupies a space that political philosophy can only access with difficulty: that of the lived experience of eviction.
In this respect, the film helps humanize a process that tends to make those who undergo it invisible. Behind the statistics and the generic terms “tenant” and “landlady,” there is a lived story.
It is the story, built up over more than 30 years, of an octogenarian’s relationship with her home, her neighbourhood and her routine. It is the story of a man who preferred to die rather than leave the home where he had lived for 40 years.
The question is: who really owns our real estate? Who really owns — not just in the legal sense, but in the human sense — a home that has been lived in by the same person for more than 30 years? Are we allowing the intolerable by stripping these people of their homes, even legally? Are we sufficiently taking into account the distress and anguish this causes?
These are the philosophical, ethical and social questions that the stories of Chiasson and Foster bring to light.
One case among thousands
Even if certain legal provisions allow for eviction, the person evicted may feel a sense of injustice. This is the case, for example, of Chiasson. A resident of the Verdun area of Montréal for decades, she was the victim of a renoviction attempt. The new owners wanted to take over her dwelling and the three others adjacent to it after carrying out major renovations.
“What hurt me the most was the owners’ attitude. They had no empathy.” — Jeannette Chiasson in Losing Your Home.
Her story shows how inconsistent it is for a society based on equal rights to tolerate major housing deprivation.
(Courtesy of the Losing Your Home team), Author provided (no reuse)
In this sense, it’s not just a matter of thinking about the distribution of fair housing. While it’s necessary to ask what measures need to be taken to build new housing or to offer financial compensation for certain evictions, the fact remains that there is a form of inequality that poses a philosophical challenge. The question is, why do we tolerate such a blatantly unequal dynamic between Chiasson and her new landlords?
Rethinking property rights
We need to rethink the social relationship between tenant and landlord as well as the role of private property rights. Without taking a long detour through the history of the concept, it’s worth noting that the appeal of home ownership is not unfounded. We often want to own property because it offers a form of freedom from others: we can do what we want in our own space, and no one can interfere with our plans.
So it’s not hard to imagine that if everyone were an owner, everyone would be equally free — at least in their own space. For some, this means putting the egalitarian character of property rights back on the agenda and taking it seriously.
Policies that promote access to property, like Canada’s First-Home Savings Account, are contemporary reflections of what is, in fact, a very old idea. Nevertheless, the crux of the matter is perhaps less about access to ownership, and more about the uncertainty inherent to the act of renting.
Perhaps it’s most important to take seriously the social consequences of the conditions that create a sense of inequality between people participating in the housing market. So it’s not necessarily a question of limiting the powers of landlords, but rather of strengthening property rights by reflecting on them in terms of their capacity to promote autonomy.
It would be possible to modify certain provisions of the housing market so that developing it becomes less damaging — or not damaging at all — to the relationship of equality that people like Chiasson, Foster and their landlords should enjoy.
In addition to the measures often proposed, such as a rent register or the construction of social or non-profit housing, this could be achieved by strengthening tenants’ rights by limiting evictions and its effects, or by finding a way to strengthen rental rights.