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Editor: Flo Schade Managing Editor: Yener Kara Federal Secretary: Barry Weisleder The Political Economy of Housing By Flo Schade - Housing commodification and mortgage debt play a huge role in the current political economy. Particularly true in the Canadian context, financialized speculation of housing plays such an outsized role that it results in the contradiction that housing serves a function very different than providing shelter for people. Let’s start with a broad three-point assessment of bourgeois economics and then specify how that relates to the housing crisis. Economics is a field that operates almost exclusively by using terminology that is designed to be confusing and obscurantist. Bourgeois economic commentary on the housing market is no different; it is propag...

Those interested in knowing more, please refer to: https://epw.in/journal/2023/8/review-urban-affairs/planning-informal.html Do DM/message me if you need a PDF of the piece.  Key arguments: 1. Draft MPD 2041 and its absence of inclusion of provision for vending and SV Act 2014 is an antecedence to the impending challenges of implementing SV Act, and to understand how it will be resisted, diluted and excluded from planning practices.  2. The Street Vendors Act is an outlier & contradicts neo-liberal urban logic and challenges the state that is used to removing informalities to ‘protect’ and ‘regulate’ street vending by assuring ‘space’. The provision of a norm of 2.5% is unpalatable to the state.  3. Planning to regulate and ascribe a location to vending c...