Carolyn Whitzman has all the answers.

She has a plan to fix the housing crisis, restore affordability, and ensure everyone has a decent place to live.

Drawing on models from around the world, Whitzman’s new book, Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis, makes a case for a suite of policies that she argues can end homelessness, lower house prices, and see millions of homes built in the decades to come.

As a researcher, urban planner, university professor, and author of six books, Whitzman has been working on housing and urban policy issues since the eighties. In recent years she has become a leading voice in contemporary discussions on the housing crisis.

Whitzman wants to see lawmakers at all levels of government come together to take what she describes as a generational view of housing. Governments should eschew short-term interventions and focus instead on reshaping Canada’s housing ecosystem to foster sustainable equity that will last decades. Central to her proposals is a broad, ongoing public investment in diverse, non-market housing. She argues that one-third of our housing stock should be non-market and another third be well-regulated market rentals.

Whitzman advocates for many of the solutions I have endorsed in my own writing. She proposes strong boundaries on the financialization of housing, investment in a variety of housing models including cooperatives, regulated short-term rentals, improved tenant protections, and robust income supports. She is critical of Canada’s history of privatizing public housing, the 2017 National Housing Strategy, and our market-oriented version of Housing First. She acknowledges that the private sector just isn’t very good at building housing appropriate for anyone but the rich. She writes passionately about the importance of raising taxes and investing in education, health, and elder care. She’s not afraid to name Canada’s devotion to neoliberalism. She scolds the federal government for allowing the effective corporate tax rate to fall to 13 percent—five percent lower than in the United States.

Overall, her ideas hew to the mainstream of contemporary housing discourse. They are the product of Whitzman’s decades-long career in academia and public policy.

That said, one can have some quibbles with her proposals. For one, Whitzman believes strongly that solving the housing crisis will necessarily require a massive increase in housing supply. She supports canards about a severe housing shortage, insisting that a lack of supply is the main driver of housing prices despite the fact that Canada’s housing supply is on-par with other G7 countries while our housing prices are pegged at over 50 percent of those of our peers. She also endorses half-understood pseudo-solutions like zoning reform. She is uncritically supportive of YIMBYs (Yes In My Back Yard) and makes no mention of that movements’ well-documented history of forcing through gentrification projects and displacing low-income communities.

These are not devastating critiques, and Home Truths could easily recover from this handful of misses. What really undermines Whitzman’s mostly sound ideas, however, is her failure to present a coherent theory of change.

On the first page of her introduction Whitzman engages in the left-punching that has become a habit for many mainstream intellectuals. For one, she raises, misrepresents, and dismisses Ricardo Tranjan’s excellent 2023 book The Tenant Class. According to Whitzman, Tranjan asserts that the housing crisis cannot be resolved without ending capitalism. Trouble is, Tranjan doesn’t make this argument. The Tenant Class dispels the notion that we have a housing ‘crisis’ at all. “A housing system that serves all but one group is not in a state of crisis,” Tranjan writes, “it is one based on structural inequality and economic exploitation.”

Tranjan describes the housing market as a source of capital accumulation for finance and real estate; this accumulation, he explains, occurs at the expense of tenants. Tranjan gives an historical account of the various strategies tenants have deployed to resist the extraction of their wages by landlords. He talks about how these strategies are being rediscovered and redeployed across Canada today and credibly claims that the political pressure created by these groups is indispensable to a broader project of housing justice.

Whitzman’s mischaracterization and dismissal of Tranjan’s work tees up the next 220 pages of her book where she determinedly papers over the conflict between property hoarders and those excluded from property ownership. Her ‘fixes’ ignore direct action in any form. Community resistance to gentrifiers, the occupation of public and private lands, and protests outside of landlords’ homes are all absent from her analysis. The long history of tenant resistance in Canada is relegated to a single mention of the celebrated 2017 Parkdale rent strike in Toronto, but even this is presented as an anomaly.

For Whitzman, the tactics that allow tenants to challenge rent increases, resist evictions, and improve their living conditions have only a marginal place in the equation for social change. In the world of Home Truths those who have been adversely impacted by the housing crisis are given no opportunity to fight back.

Instead of seeing the housing crisis as a conflict over who owns our homes and for what purpose, Whitzman sees it as a simple policy failure. The way to fix Canada’s housing crisis is not by challenging the people who profit from rising housing prices, but to convince lawmakers to make “data driven” and “evidence based” reforms Throughout Home Truths Whitzman insists on “engaging stakeholders” and “big table” solutioning that brings investors, banks, pension funds, developers, and landlords to the table with governments and Indigenous nations.

Her book is full of examples of what happens when you let the private sector and neoliberal orthodoxy decide public policy, yet, in full view of this history, she wants to keep the fox in the henhouse. She refuses to reckon with the fact that the predators she would keep at the table have been the source of every housing policy failure of the last half-century.

For Whitzman, profit-focused housing initiatives such as the privatization of social housing, the National Housing Strategy, and Canada’s Housing First programs are government missteps, not wins for big business.

There’s no room in Whitzman’s worldview for contradicting material interests. No room for the fact that the housing crisis benefits the wealthy to the tune of $10 billion a year in rent payments and $10 trillion in accumulated housing values. There’s no sense that the beneficiaries of this arrangement might use their wealth to push for policies that allow them to accrue even more. She is unable to wrestle with the notion that housing policy decisions might be deliberately constructed to enrich landlords, developers, and finance capital at the expense of tenants.

Whitzman’s refusal to engage with the contradictions inherent in exploiter-exploited relationships leaves her sitting at her ‘big table’ with a couple hundred pages of bright ideas and no leverage. Implicit in her writing is the assumption that things will be better if we can get the right ideas in front of the right people at the right time. In her view the housing crisis has nothing to do with capital accumulation and everything to do with bad policy. And the reason governments have pursued bad policy? Well, they haven’t listened to the right experts.

Whitzman wants the adults in the room to be reasonable. She wants the political and business classes to come to a favourable. She longs for a social democratic restoration; a compromise regime guided by Good Ideas. It’s a policy wonk’s fantasy. And it stands in sharp contrast to the grounded vision cast by pragmatists on the front lines of real social change.

Organizers with the Los Angeles Tenants Union, Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, published their book Abolish Rent several months before Home Truths hit the shelves. Their text contains stories from the union’s daily struggle for housing justice. They develop a theory of change from their experiences both as victims of the housing crisis and as organizers who stand alongside their neighbours to fight their victimizers. For Rosenthal and Vilchis the future we work towards must not be limited to mitigating the exploitation of vulnerable people; we must instead demand the total eradication of that exploitation through the abolition of rent as such. Grounded in the active, ongoing resistance of tenants and unhoused communities, Abolish Rent presents a radical vision for the future that is meaningfully different from our unjust present while remaining brazenly optimistic and eminently practical.

In contrast, the ‘fixes’ Whitzman proposes in Home Truths lack a core of pragmatism. They are predictable to anyone who has spent time reading and thinking about the housing crisis. The solutions she proposes were shelved by Parliament decades ago; not because decisionmakers are insufficiently data driven, but because of who wields economic and political power. In the absence of a movement capable of challenging the interests of finance capital, landlords, and speculative investors, Whitzman’s ‘fixes’ are nothing more than academic ideations.

If you are interested in the policies a social democratic government might enact to manage the housing crisis, Home Truths is for you. But if you want to challenge the forces that perpetuate our exploitative housing system, if you want to build the power necessary to bring about reforms capable of ending homelessness, restoring affordability, and securing a dignified life for all, you would be better served by Tranjan’s The Tenant Class or Rosenthal and Vilchis’s Abolish Rent.

James Hardwick is a writer and community advocate. He has over ten years experience serving adults experiencing poverty and houselessness with various NGOs across the country.