WOLFF: In getting ready for today, I read an article. It's a woman who's writing out of
her own experience of having been homeless for a while with her mother as a child and then having
had insecure apartments for much of her teenage years into adulthood. And that when she went,
finally needing it, to a therapist, the therapist listened to her for some sessions
and then said to her, In my professional experience, you have PTSD." In other words,
that that illness that is usually associated with soldiers coming back from wartime experiences
(post-traumatic stress is what it's about) that is as likely to result from being denied housing
as a human right as it is from the horrors of warfare that beset soldiers. How do you see it?
FARHA: Absolutely, that's a moving story and it's one that I've seen and heard told to me over and
over and over again. Because I've met with people living in homelessness all around the world as
well as people living in really precarious housing situations, and you can see the stress and trauma
that they've experienced as a result of of inadequate housing and inadequate security.
The whole situation of homelessness- people ask me all the time- well what are the causes
of homelessness? And I've got a short answer for that. The cause of homelessness is the failure
of governments to implement the human right to housing, because if they did implement it,
we wouldn't have people living in homelessness. So that is a very tidy understanding of what's going
on here. Governments are failing to do what they are supposed to do, what is the morally
right thing to do, and what they've legally committed themselves to doing which is ensuring-
not just addressing homelessness - but ensuring that our housing systems don't
produce homelessness, ensuring that our housing systems don't produce housing insecurity. That's
not at all what's going on right now. And you and I can talk about that with respect to the
financialization of housing and the role that that's playing, but governments are not leading.
Governments are allowing the private sector to lead, and with the private sector leading,
we are seeing really horrible outcomes: women with PTSD because they've lived
in homelessness and housing precarity, right? That's the outcome we're seeing. People dying
on our streets across North America because governments are allowing the privates to lead.
WOLFF: The private sector in a capitalist system makes investments; in other words,
builds houses, renovates them, creates apartment buildings, whatever if it's profitable. That's the
logic of this system. If they do it, it's because they expect it to be profitable,
and if they don't do it, it's because they don't expect it to be profitable. And therefore,
they invest their capital someplace else. So am I hearing you right, that the private sector's
profit-driven rationality produces a problem- namely a disconnect between the human beings in
our community and the housing they have a human right to? And so we're asking the government to
come in and to do what private capitalism has failed to do. Is that the argument?
FARHA: It could be! So, here's the thing. I think that you can still make a profit and
do housing that's consistent with the right to housing. And I think it just depends on
when you expect to make that profit over what period of time and how much profit you expect
to make. I don't want to say that capitalism is completely inconsistent with the human right to
housing. I don't think that serves us well at all because we're never... First of all,
the human right to housing does not mean social housing only. It means that the whole housing
system has to produce housing that the poorest household can access as well as housing that
other levels of income households can access. That's what it means, and so I want to believe
that with proper leading by governments- that means through legislation, through policies,
through programs- the private sector could in fact contribute to the implementation of
the right to adequate housing. That is not how the system is set up right now, no way.