2026 CBC Massey Lectures - by Leilani Farha (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Housing has become a crisis of humanity--deliberately manufactured and decades in the making.

Housing is essential to human existence. In these lectures, Leilani Farha exposes how those who hold power betray this truth by regarding people as disposable and homes as commodities.

Across six continents, Farha enters the homes of those fighting for survival--families facing eviction, communities being erased, people criminalized for having nowhere to go. Through these intimate encounters and her own reckoning from the centre of global housing debates, she reveals how financial and political elites have turned homes into instruments of profit at the expense of human dignity and rights. The same ideology that justifies seizing Indigenous land and resources--one where some people simply don't count--now prices out young people, displaces tenants, destroys whole communities and disappears homeless people.

Writing with fierce clarity, Farha connects these stories with her own reflections on power, complicity and the limits of reform to spark a different conversation about home. This is an urgent call for a new ideology--one rooted in humanity, where home is the foundation of justice itself.