HCRC Launch Recap and Gratitude
Thank you to everyone who joined us at the University of Toronto’s Multifaith Centre for the launch of the Housing Commons Research Centre on October 17. It was an inspiring evening of dialogue on how community-led housing can shape a more just and caring future.
Summary | Photos & Videos | Related Mentions | Event Survey
Summary
Our October panel brought together community leaders, organizers, researchers, and practitioners to explore what it truly means to treat housing and land as a commons rather than a commodity. Speakers connected today’s housing injustices to colonial land enclosure and the ongoing displacement of unhoused and marginalized communities, underscoring that the “housing crisis” is not accidental—it’s structural. (The following was prepared with support from Darren Peck.)
Panellists emphasized that commons-based approaches are not new; they draw from Indigenous stewardship, Black and diaspora traditions of collective care, cooperative models, and everyday practices of mutual aid. Whether through encampments asserting the right to space, co-ops protecting affordability, or community land trusts resisting speculation, the commons emerges as both a return to relationship and a refusal of isolation.
A strong theme throughout the conversation was the need to decolonize knowledge. Speakers called on researchers to work with communities, not extract from them, and to make invisible experiences visible through storytelling, art, lived expertise, and community-owned data. They challenged academic and policy institutions to reflect honestly on their limitations, while also recognizing that research can help expose myths, such as the so-called “tragedy of the commons.”
Discussion on state responsibility surfaced tensions between public housing, community control, and the realities of colonial governance. The panel landed on a “yes/and” approach: strengthening non-market models like co-ops and CLTs while also insisting on accountable, well-funded public housing workarounds and system change at the same time.
Above all, the event highlighted that alternatives already exist. People are building them through collective organizing, shared stewardship, and new (and old) ways of relating to land and to each other.
“We can move beyond the current systems. The alternatives are here and tangible.”
Finally, to paraphrase the words of our New Housing Alternatives co-leader, Alan Walks, “no revolution has gotten anywhere without music and dancing“. At the NHA fall workshop, we wrapped up the event in fine style with friends, partners, and collaborators, and we wanted to share some of the good vibes with you, too. Check out the NHAxHCRC workshop social Spotify playlist!
Photos & Videos
Photo and video: Matthew Burpee
Related Mentions
- Pace, Nat. (2025, Oct 21). Research as Resistance: New Housing Alternatives Enters Year Two. Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts. communityland.ca/category/blog
- Toronto Society of Architects. Reimagining Housing as a Commons. torontosocietyofarchitects.ca/events
