The Shift’s Global Director
Leilani Farha is the 2026 CBC Massey Lecturer
Pre-order Housing Inc. and get your tickets!
In Housing, Inc., Leilani argues that today’s housing crisis was not inevitable but engineered over four decades by the governments and financial firms who turned homes into sites of extraction. She traces the same logic that dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their lands to the evictions, unaffordable rents, and disappearing shelter beds of today; and argues the crisis can be undone. The lectures and the book they’re based on will bring her to cities across Canada this Fall.
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The Shift is a global organization working at the intersection of housing, finance, and climate through a human rights lens. We believe that the right to adequate housing is not an aspiration; it is a binding obligation that governments have already agreed to meet. Our work is grounded in that conviction: that housing systems can and must be held to a human rights standard, and that lasting solutions come not from managing the crisis but from transforming the conditions that created it.
A Housing Strategy Is Only as Good as the Values It’s Built On
Investor Guidelines
We’re often told that affordable housing is not the responsibility of market housing providers. However, truly responsible investing plans for the future – and the future is human rights.
a
human
right,
not
a
commodity
or
an
extractive
industry.
The Shift connects and mobilizes anyone working to secure the right to housing.
