PUSHBACK Talks

Get Your Hands Off My Asset! The Shift Directives Part 2

• WG Film • Season 8 • Episode 4

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In the second installment of this four-part special series, Pushback Talks Producer Kirsten delves deeper into The Shift Directives with Leilani & Sam.

Leilani and Sam get into Directive 7 of The Shift Directives, which is all about protecting tenants and creating spaces for them to participate in the future of their communities.

Together the three cut to the heart of modern housing challenges: AI-driven rent hikes, the cascading crisis of unaffordability and evictions, and the looming specter of homelessness. Leilani and Sam lay out the urgent need for robust tenant protections, advocating for a seismic shift towards transparency, meaningful participation, and the integration of human rights principles in housing policies.

Read The Shift Directives and follow the series for the next four weeks.

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Fredrik Gertten:

I'm Fredrik Gertten and I'm the filmmaker, and I'm Leilani Farha and I'm the advocate. You are the advocate, and I'm the filmmaker, and that's how we met. Once upon a time when I was trying to make this film that we named push, and from that came out this pushback, talks Exactly. And when we shot you were the Special Rapporteur of human rights of housing for the UN but then you started the shift, and the shift has had a secret life, developing human rights directives for housing. Tell us about this. Leilani,

Leilani Farha:

yeah, so I figured it would be useful for people to understand the way in which human rights can shape our housing system and make it better, so that things aren't so expensive, so that young people can actually afford homes, and so that we push back against institutional investors, private equity firms, hedge funds, vulture funds, from eating up our housing and making things impossible. So with my colleague Sam Freeman, we created the shift directives. There's just 10 super straightforward and a big section of the directives really focuses on tenant protections, because tenants obviously are so vulnerable, especially when their landlord is on Wall Street with all the power and all the money. And so this episode of pushback talks really focuses on what's necessary and required under human rights law to protect tenants.

Fredrik Gertten:

This is really important. And I remember one of our previous podcasts here with Johanna Kuck from Berlin, one of the great activists in Berlin. She said, for the new kind of financialized landlords, their clients are not the tenants. Their clients are the investors. And I don't think it's sustainable to have a world where the landlords are mainly there to serve investors, not the tenants. It's excuse the language. It's a fucked up relation, absolutely.

Leilani Farha:

And really Fredrik, these landlords who have shareholders as their clients say, well, they have a what? They use this language, this fancy language fiduciary duty to their shareholder, which means to just produce as much money for their shareholder as they can. And with the directives we're trying to say, actually human rights is your fiduciary duty. And in fact, shareholders have to know that, that there are these things called Human Rights out there, and that they matter as much as money. In fact, they matter more than money, and

Fredrik Gertten:

that's why we have the shift human rights directives and housing and and this is now the episode two of our series. And now you and Sam, interviewed by Kirsten, is going to talk about the tenant rights. I mean, in Sweden, for example, we have stronger tenant rights than in most countries. But we can also see that the big actors, the big global actors, have found a way to kind of round our rights and weaken them. So it's also here we are under a threat. So welcome the shift directives.

Kirsten McRae:

All right. So here we are back again to discuss more of the shift directives, which are the first ever comprehensive framework providing governments and investors with guidance to effectively address the financialization of housing in accordance with human rights law. Last week we got to know the authors of this groundbreaking framework a bit better, and we discussed directives one, nine and 10. So if you haven't already, be sure to check that out. This week we'll be discussing one single directive, I would call it the heart of the entire document, and that is directive seven, enact effective legislative protections for tenants and ensure their participation. Behind every statistic, every policy decision and every real estate transaction, there are human lives and stories, and I think that's what directive seven is all about. So today, we'll be exploring what this means in practice. How can we shift the balance of power to ensure that housing serves its primary purpose, providing safe, stable homes for people? How can we ensure that the voices of tenants are not just heard but actually shape housing policies and practices? So welcome back. Sam and Leilani, how are you doing?

Sam Freeman:

Good? It's good to be back. Yeah. Thanks. Kirsten,

Kirsten McRae:

ready to talk about tenant protections? Always,

Sam Freeman:

always ready to talk about tenant protections. That's

Leilani Farha:

right. As you say, the heart and soul of the directives and of human rights themselves, right? That's why they call them human rights, because it's a bit huge. And being Yeah,

Kirsten McRae:

so just jumping straight in, we talk a lot about financialization at the shift and on the podcast, and when we're talking about tenants, how has the financialization of housing shifted decision making away from residents and from communities?

Sam Freeman:

I mean, it's kind of fundamentally, I mean, decisions about housing are made in boardrooms now, rather than being made by the people who are actually living in the housing or using that housing for its its basic purpose, right as a home. You know, the financialization I mentioned on the last episode, that what it's done is it's taken place primacy on the fiduciary duty that investors have towards their shareholders, and kind of removed any notion or understanding of the duty that they have towards their tenants. So, you know, financialization at its core, is about making more money, whether or not that works out well for tenants, is a kind of afterthought. I

Leilani Farha:

was just going to reiterate what Sam said about this boardroom aspect of housing right now, in some ways, it's actually mind boggling that a bunch of men, and it's mostly men, completely divorced from the locality where housing is found are making decisions that fundamentally affect people's lives. So literally, I mean Blackstone. You say Blackstone headquarters like in Manhattan. I mean Blackstone is one of the biggest players. It's the biggest private equity in terms of residential real estate. And really, their offices are in Manhattan. I visited them on the outside. Didn't get inside, and it's remarkable. Or even worse, I mean, a lot of these companies are publicly listed, right? So they're corporations that are publicly listed. That means people can buy shares, so this fiduciary duty to shareholders, the shareholder could be living in Florida and owning something in Berlin, and that shareholder their interests have nothing to do with housing. Their interest is only a return on their investment. So that fiduciary duty isn't even a fiduciary duty to what the shareholder wants. Maybe the shareholder would like housing to be affordable and decent and secure, but they're not asked that. The relationship is you give me money and you buy shares and I give you a return on that investment. That's it. So it's become this, like clinical financial I mean, it's not to say, like we don't ever at the shift. Want to paint too rosy a picture of landlord tenant relations pre financialization, right? It's always been akin to employer employee relations. There's a power imbalance that has to be mediated, navigated, etc. So it's not to say that there's something called a benevolent landlord, necessarily, right, the small scale benevolent landlord, but at least when a landlord is part of a community, they may have a greater stake in ensuring that they aren't reviled, right, reviled by their community, right? It's very close to home, literally. So, yeah, there is an added incentive to be decent and to be more human rights compliant when the owner is proximate to what they own. Yeah,

Kirsten McRae:

on my most recent trip to New York, when I was walking around, I saw this big billboard that said New York City, the real estate capital of the world, and I was like, what an interesting way to frame it, which, of course, I spent my childhood there. And so I'm quite aware of the difference between New York now and New York in the 90s. And a big part of that is who owns what and what is the purpose of their ownership. And there was a very clear shift between this kind of community oriented focus, and then slowly it was like, this feels less and less personal, and less and less like a community and more like a place where people live, yeah, because they have to, not because, you know, they're creating it together with the people who are there exactly,

Sam Freeman:

and just to jump into that quickly. I mean, we have talked, and it's right to talk about decisions being made in boardrooms. But actually, in some ways, it's actually becoming to be more messed up than that, because it's not even necessarily decisions being made in boardrooms. It's now decisions being made by computers and by algorithms, right? It's people plugging in data about what a market rent is and what the units in the building their own are currently paying and working out, using algorithms, using equations, to work out how they can bring those rents up to that market rate, or above market rate, in the shortest possible time. I mean, it's, yeah, it's becoming almost dystopian in some ways, in the way that it's working. I know,

Leilani Farha:

yeah, that's. Absolutely right. There's that huge case in the states and now in the US, and it's come to Canada too, that there's a case against that company real page, I think they're called, there was a big article about them, I think, in the Atlantic, or one of those American media outlets. And I mean price setting, basically price setting, it should be captured by antitrust laws. Don't know if that's how they're arguing the real page case, but I remember when the global financial crisis first happened, which is, of course, when we saw the advent of the financialization that we're talking about. And I remember watching that movie, and I think there was a book, what was it called? Come on, guys, famous movie about the global financial crisis, The Big Short.

Sam Freeman:

I always worry about getting things wrong when people ask me movie titles Big Short,

Leilani Farha:

and I think it was in The Big Short, or maybe it was afterward it was revealed that. And certainly we know this through our research Sam that the big private equity firms and asset management companies really do use software that was developed for them so that they could figure which assets would be going to sale before anyone else could see them. So I don't know if it was Zillow, and I, you know, I don't want to get us into any trouble here on the podcast. So it wasn't Zillow, but basically, you know, they had, at the time of the global financial crisis, they had access to information that enabled them to be predatory, and that other people didn't have access to. And that remains the case, right? So there's this dystopian world that Sam talked about, I think is quite right, quite right, and so deleterious for tenants who are really at the mercy of all of this,

Kirsten McRae:

where I mean directive seven, it mentions that. So governments will often compromise on tenant protections to facilitate profit making. And we're kind of talking about this already, but what does that actually look like in practice? So you were saying price setting and kind of forced vacancy, not forced vacancy. Yeah, forced vacancy. So keeping the apartments emptied to drive up demand for that building, whatever it is, or what other ways might this show up in people's lives? Yeah,

Sam Freeman:

I mean, I think you can kind of boil it down to Acts and omissions, right? So governments will will take defined action in order to reduce tenant protections, whether that is by rolling back existing, you know, protections like, like rent protections, whether that's making evictions easier in certain circumstances, whether that's, you know, allowing investors to tack on additional fees, you know, they will take those actions in order to attract additional real estate investment. Under this premise that which we talked about last episode, that real estate investment is the kind of ticket out of the crisis. This false notion that that real estate investment is our is our way out of the housing crisis, which obviously completely ignores the fact that real estate investment, on the most part, is the housing crisis, but also emissions, failing to do stuff, failing to do what they should be doing as protectors, self proclaimed protectors, of international human rights law. You know, they've all signed up to this idea, this that housing is a human right, and they've all accepted that that contained that that puts on them responsibilities to as Leilani said, I think last episode, to ensure that housing is for the people. It's for people, right? It's not for corporations, it's for people. So failing to implement those tenant protections, failing to implement vacancy control, which allows or incentivizes the eviction of tenants, because landlords know that they can, you know, if they evict a tenant, they could raise the rent as much as they like. Yeah, it often comes as a package, but yeah at its heart is entirely about incentivizing that investment.

Leilani Farha:

Yeah. And I mean, I think what that raises is the idea, I think our listeners should get their heads around, if they haven't already, is governments. There is no line between governments and financial investors in housing or corporations who own housing. They are all one group. They use the same political ideology, economic framework, and they are working together in concert period, and that's why you end up with these weak tenant protections, because what governments are trying to do is uphold finance, uphold corporations and their role in the real estate market and the housing system, because of this ideology, this belief that this is good for our economy, even though it is only good for a few people. And really bad for a lot of other people. So when we approach tenant protections, we're doing exactly what Sam said, Right? We're looking at, okay, what have they done that's good, that probably needs to be bolstered. But where are the omissions? And the omissions are often things that are very purposeful, intentional omissions. Let's put it that way. The weaknesses are intentional, but so are the omissions.

Kirsten McRae:

I like that. So that brings to mind when, when I was in school I which I studied global affairs, there was a point where we were given an assignment, and the professor specifically, was like, no one is allowed to suggest public private partnership. And at that was at a certain point in the curriculum. So he was like, I think he was like, I think at this point you should understand why that doesn't always work out. It's like, if you have a private partnership, there will always be some level of like financial like mandate, there must be a profit, so it can't really be the type of public good that we're looking for. So the intention was, you need to reach beyond just going to the private sector to use their money and then guaranteeing them this profit, because it just changes the way that you engage with the entire nature of the thing. Yeah,

Sam Freeman:

yeah. Isn't this? I mean, this is kind of what Peter S Goodman calls the cosmic liar, right? This idea that those who are responsible for the issues that we're facing society are the ones to get us out of this situation, and, you know, putting in place incentives, which would include omitting to legislate effective tenant protections are an effective means of solving our housing crisis, because they benefit this player, which is seen as being the solution, but which just is not.

Kirsten McRae:

Yeah, so we're talking about tenants and enacting effective protections for them. What I mean, I this is, this is a big question, so focus in on this. However, works for you. But what could some of these legislative protections look like? They'll obviously be case by case, or they'll differ depending on the exact landscape. But can you give us an idea of some idea of what they can look like? Yeah,

Leilani Farha:

sure, we have in directive Sebastian cronholm, there are some really strict things that come directly out of international human rights law, one of which is, well, the whole area of evictions, and what can evictions look like? And while human rights law would never say you can never legally evict someone. Of course, evictions that are in legislation and legislated can be okay, but there are certain conditions that have to attach. For example, it is illegal under international human rights law. It would be a violation if an eviction rendered someone homeless. So when you think about that, well, then what does that mean in terms of, how do you legislate for that? Well, we know that it then means that a landlord, one has to get to know their tenant and the implications of the eviction for their tenant. How does a shareholder do that? How does Blackstone do that right now. They can hire property management companies, for example, who would care. But the state also has to get involved, and we've seen this in Spain, for example, in some jurisdictions in Spain, they have set up apparatus so that when an eviction goes to court or a tribunal before the eviction can be adjudicated. There is an investigation as to what would happen to the individual or family being evicted, and if it looks like they would be rendered homeless, they have nowhere else to go. They can't afford anything. There has to be a solution. So either it's a solution with the landlord, so the landlord lowers the rent, or, you know, get a rent supplement from the government, or something like that, or the tenant or household is connected to a social worker, and they fashion a remedy. So you see how rich it is and how human centered it is, and what the goal is. That's why eviction into homelessness exists. Eviction into homelessness is a violation, because the impact of homelessness on an individual is obviously horrendous, life threatening, and so it's trying to prevent those really negative things from happening. Another thing we've seen across many jurisdictions is no fault evictions. Well, that would just be contrary to human rights, so you just couldn't have provisions that allowed for no fault eviction, so those would have to be taken off. Yeah, I'll cede the floor now to Sam. I'm sure he's got lots of things to say. He worked so directly with tenants. Yeah,

Sam Freeman:

I mean, to be fair, I think you've put it extremely articulately, but I mean, there just needs to be a recognition from governments about the devastation that can occur in the absence of these protection and you know, one of the other recommendations we make in this is meaningful participation. I mean, that has to occur at many levels, but it should occur as well in relation to the construction of tenant protections, to the implementation of tenant protection. To the design of tenant protections. I find myself this is maybe a terrible thing to say, but I find myself kind of increasingly disinterested in anyone other than tenants opinions on housing right on rental housing, right? They are the ones that live there. They are the ones that suffer the consequences of failed policy or hostile policy. You know, it's they who should be listened to at every single opportunity to understand what needs to be done in order to ensure that their housing remains or becomes secure and affordable and dignified. At its core, we can't do that without their voices. So, you know, when we're talking about what tenant protection should be introduced in a particular context? Well, you have a resource available to you, a resource of the greatest experts you will ever meet in your entire life on this particular subject. You know, governments and investors should be relying on that.

Leilani Farha:

Yeah, and it, there's a human right to participate and to be meaningfully engaged and to be able to affect decisions that are going to have a huge impact on your life. And I mean, I think when we talk about that with landlords, they're like, how would we do that? And you know, it's not that difficult. And they could stop union busting, for example, which is what they do. So I mean, tenants try to form associations and unions all the time, and landlords will just simply ignore them. Just ignore them. Well, that's a kind of union busting, and we understand in the field of employment how important it is to hear from employees about their working conditions. And I'm not saying that there isn't union busting of employees, and boy, do we see it right, and how difficult it was, for example, for a union to form around Amazon unions and the working conditions of employees of Walmart, you know, these big, huge corporations hugely problematic. But I think it's understood generally by society that workers have an important opinion about their work conditions, especially covid. Really exposed that right which is how the Amazon union was first formed by Chris smalls, and we had a podcast with Chris. Everyone should go and listen to that. But I think where housing's concerned, the idea of tenants unions in many, many parts of the world is just not considered legitimate and should be, and has and has to be. Tenants know what they need. And I have never, you know. I've met a lot of tenants in my 25 plus year career, and I have never, ever met in the north and in the Global South, I've never met someone who said they wanted a free ride exactly that they didn't want to pay for housing that they every tenant I've met, every homeless person says I want to pay. I just want to pay within my means, and I want security of tenure. And, you know, I don't want to feel like I could be evicted at any minute, and so we need legislation to protect those things like the affordability of housing in the directives we actually didn't get into. You know, should there be rent caps or rent control or that kind of thing? We just simply say that legislation should comply with the international human right to housing, and it provides everything you need to know. Housing has to be affordable, so at the end of the month, you have enough money to pay for other basic needs and basic rights like food and medicines. You have to have security of tenure, etc. So we think all of that should just be built into legislation, as well as this notion of meaningful engagement and participation, and landlords just have to figure out how to do it. I really have always loved the idea that you see what these landlords do is they are searching the landscape for affordable housing that they can purchase, right? They call it undervalued assets, so assets that they think they could purchase and increase the valuation of. And I always thought that if a building goes up for sale, tenants should be told that the building is up for sale. Sometimes they're not. They don't even know. They should be told, and they should there should be mechanisms available to them to purchase like the right of first refusal. So the tenants should be approached, and whether it's a single family home or a multi family apartment building, they should be given an opportunity to figure out a way to purchase it, and reasonable way to purchase it. These are the sorts of things that I think tenants find exciting and would be, you know, is there a way to turn something into a community land trust when it's up for sale? You know, if I'm going to live in a building, I want to have a say in, who's going to set the rules of where I'm living? Right? Yeah,

Kirsten McRae:

absolutely, I'm smiling so big because, literally, you went down. Line of things that I had that I wanted to talk about. You covered no fault, no fault, evictions, and then you got straight into meaningful participation. So as you were going down, I was like, Oh, yep, I wanted to talk about that. Wanted to talk about that. So you've touched on so many of the important pieces that I wanted to make sure that people could hear about. And speaking of meaningful participation, I was curious how much thought you've given to I'm sure you've given lots of thought to this. But how can we ensure that tenant participation goes beyond tokenism and actually influences decisions? Because, like you said, These people want to contribute to their communities. They want to be a part of a community, and they want to have a say in the quality and the nature of the place that they live. But often when, even if they are consulted, which they typically are not, if they are, oftentimes nothing will happen with it, or it will be implemented in a way that's like, oh, look, hey, you got what you asked for, but it's not like the spirit of it is no longer there. So are there ways that we can help ensure that meaningful participation is enacted fully.

Sam Freeman:

I think legislating transparency is critical to that. You know, investors are so commonly allowed to hide behind this veil, the corporate veil, right, which is usually used to talk about beneficial ownership, but it works in this context too, is that decisions, as we mentioned earlier, allowed to be made in boardrooms with no transparency as to where that decision came from and who influenced it. You know, they don't have to in many jurisdictions, at least, you know, consult with tenants. I so routinely hear from tenants who tell me that their problem started when they received a letter through their posts box or under their door, which said your unit is now owned by XYZ limited, right? They'd never heard of them, and they've they'd never been told that this was happening. So transparency investors, if you're operating in an area which is a human right, you have a responsibility and you have a duty to disclose the way that you operate your investments, right, like the way that you control your investments and the decisions that you make about them, and that means that you know, if which we recommend in the directives that government should make meaningful participation, a kind of legislative requirement in their domestic context, When consultation happens, I would also say that meaningful participation should go well beyond consultation as well. It should involve. Tenants. Should be involved at every stage of a process about their housing, but at least when the consultation process happens, that tenants can see where their opinions have gone, and they can see how those opinions were received by their investor, and they can see how they were implemented, yeah, but you need transparency. So this

Kirsten McRae:

is something that we've been trying to tackle in some recent projects. It's kind of flowing into this was about how can grassroots movements or tenant organizations effectively partner with policymakers or people who are making decisions about housing to to implement. You know, what's laid out in directive seven, and I know this is something that we've spoken about recently with our work, is the role of trust in establishing these kinds of relationships. But how do you think that these movements, these tenant organizations, could effectively work with landlords policymakers to ensure that it goes forward in the best spirit possible. Yeah.

Leilani Farha:

I mean, I think the trust issue is a really difficult one. I think it's very difficult for tenants to work directly with financialized landlords, but they have. I mean, in Spain, certainly, there's a big movement of tenants, originally homeowners who lost their homes due to the mortgage foreclosure crisis, which was the basis of the global financial crisis. It's an organization called PA, P, A, H, and they have sat down with Blackstone. I don't know if they sat down, but they made their demands very, very clear. And they are a political force. They are recognized by government in Spain as a political entity requiring to be listened to, and I think therefore Blackstone takes them seriously. They have a lot of power. They prevent evictions. They stand in the way of a lot of the policies that Blackstone and other vulture funds, as they call them in Spain, tried to impose. So I don't think it's easy. I think that if governments actually did what governments are supposed to do, which is implement the human rights of tenants and low income people and governments are supposed to meaningfully engage them. That would be a good starting point, because if governments were taking their experiences and voices seriously, then perhaps so too would corporations, etc, and it might also be sort of imposed by government on these landlords. That was very articulate, but

Sam Freeman:

mm. That, no, I think just to build on it really and maybe to bring us back full circle, I think the way that you get tenants to feel like they are able to sit down and work with, particularly with investors, is tenant protections. Right? Is tenants not feeling that if they speak their mind, their tenant is going to evict them or raise their rents from retribution, which we've seen happen around the world. I mean, so many tenants are subjected to just mistreatment because they've spoken out. So if you have effective tenant protections where tenants know they are secure in their homes, I'm not saying for one second that's all that's needed to get tenants to the table, and that's entirely up to tenants as to whether they are willing to sit down with landlords, particularly in a context where landlords have fundamentally undermined their dignity for such a long time in many instances. But having those tenant protections in place, having those protections from eviction in place, having those affordability protections in place, at least gives them some elements of security. They know that their voice is just as powerful, if not more, as it should be, than the people who own their homes. Yeah,

Leilani Farha:

can I just add one more thing? And I know we're probably going to need to wrap up soon, but just on the issue of tenants organizing and transparency, et cetera, first of all, we have to realize how difficult it is for tenants to organize and mobilize. Most tenants have jobs, full time jobs, and are busy with life, right, and working, etc. So when they're mobilizing, they're doing so after hours, right? This is what they do off the side of their sofa or whatever. So that's one two. Sam already mentioned how the stakes are so high. So if they advocate against their landlord, they may be subject to eviction, maltreatment, et cetera, and that is life altering and life threatening in some cases. So the stakes are really high. I do think, however, if there was more transparency, especially around the selling and purchasing of buildings, tenants would become even more outraged than they already are. I have had occasion to look at a brief that is put on a building when it's going to be sold. So it's a memorandum that gets written about. You know why this is a good property to buy. If tenants could get their hands on these documents, they would be shocked. They would see their unit number listed and when the rent will be increasing and the amount of profit that the new purchaser could make, just by raising that one unit's rent, for example, they would see that this is all just a mathematical equation. There is no human being behind the purchase and sale of properties by these financial actors. And I think it would just really enrage and I think that's part of the idea of transparency is to curb behavior. So once a corporation has to be transparent about the purchase and sale of a property, suddenly they're not going to be so willing to put things in the public domain. Suddenly their behavior changes, and we saw that in Denmark, where they required landlords to put to list in buildings the cost of every unit, the monthly rent of every unit, so they couldn't then, when there was turnover, suddenly jack up the rent of that one unit, because It would look so bad, right? That's the beauty of transparency. Transparency itself is an accountability mechanism.

Kirsten McRae:

I love that. So we do need to wrap up. I did have one last question for our listeners, something that I get in my inbox a lot is from individuals who want an idea of what it is they can do. How can I help? How can I mobilize in some way? So I'm curious, if you've contemplated how individuals, whether they're tenants or homeowners or even individuals, I have a cousin who who works in real estate, and he asked me, he's like, How can I go about this in a way that is more consistent with human rights? Is there something that I can actually implement in my my business model, and he's already charitable. So when I spoke to him about it, he was like, Oh, I actually already do those things, so I feel really good. But how can people contribute to realizing the vision of directive seven? Do you think that there are any actions that people can take in their lives to build towards implementing these protections for tenants. Well,

Sam Freeman:

when it comes to investors themselves, I think I can say that we're shortly going to be releasing a new document, a document of guidelines for investors on realizing the right to housing, how they can go about shifting to this human rights based framework within their activities or building you. Portfolios that align with human rights standards. So when those are released, take those on board and implement them fully into their business practices with investors as well. Listen to your tenants evolve your tenants recognize your tenants are the experts here. Recognize that they have a right, human right, a fundamental human right to safe and dignified and secure housing, and put that as your primary concern in what you're doing. And I think for kind of the public generally, just be aware, you know, it's so easy to get bogged down in this kind of, oh, well, investors are the answer, and we need more investors to solve the housing crisis. Be aware that that is just such a flawed position. It's a position that's perpetuated by investors so they can continue their activities to make more and more money. There's no you know reality in the statement that investors are there are ticket out of the housing crisis. It's quite the opposite. So just be aware, and I suppose, try and influence politics as much as you are able to in your country, vote, contact your elected officials to let them know that what's going on is unacceptable and that they need to put tenants and people who actually live in housing and use it for its human purpose first. Yeah,

Leilani Farha:

I totally agree with everything you just said, Sam, it's so bang on. And one of the things that we've tried to be very careful about at the shift is we don't see the financialization of housing as caused by everyday people, and we don't want the burden to fall on Everyday people. However, we do feel that there is a culture of financialization that has taken hold as if it's acceptable, and so we do want every individual homeowner, tenant, investor, etc, but really like even just the homeowner, to ask themselves, what is their relationship to housing? Do they wring their hands with glee when they found out that their house that they purchased five years ago is now supposedly four times what they valued at, four times what they purchased it for? Do they recognize that that market valuation is fiction, not a truth. You know, those are the sorts of questions that are important for people to ask themselves, because that's how we change culture, is when you start questioning what you've taken as a given, right, when you start really examining, well, what is the impact? Okay, that might be great for me, but what's the impact for my community? I mean, I'm watching my neighborhood used to be a diverse neighborhood, small homes, medium sized homes, bigger homes, lower income people, you know, higher income people. I'm watching my neighborhood become predominantly extremely affluent, and the diversity and kind of vibe it used to have is and I don't want that. I don't want that. I liked the vibrancy of my neighborhood. There are no single people who could afford to live in my neighborhood. For example, forget it. It's impossible. So what does that mean? Right? So I think that's what we really want, including through the shift directives, is for people to just start questioning things Airbnb. I know we're going to get there eventually, right? Ask yourself, how am I affecting this community when I rent an Airbnb and go on vacation? Right? It's not to make people feel guilty. It is to make people feel a little less comfortable, to just question. We do it all the time, right? We question our purchasing patterns. So we're saying, Okay, question, how you engage housing,

Kirsten McRae:

right? I love that. So we'll wrap things up there and come back refresh to talk about some more directives next time, because there's a lot to cover, like you said, we said to talk about Airbnb. There's all kinds of stuff to get to, although I feel like I ask a question, and then you guys just run through all the information I can ever want to know. Which is great. It's great. It's, I think it's reflective of just how passionate you both are about this, how well you know what it is you wrote and what you would like for that to look like in practice, which is really beautiful. And I'm really excited to talk about some more directives next week. So everybody be sure to come back and listen in when we'll be talking about directives four, five and eight. If you want to know what those are, you can go read the shift directives right now, or you can listen in next week, and we'll be talking about what those are. And I'll share more with you on those then, but until then. Sam, Leilani, thank you so much for your time. I hope you have a great rest of your day, rest of your week, and I'll talk to you soon.

Leilani Farha:

Thanks. Kirsten, thank

Sam Freeman:

you so much. So much fun talking to you both.

Fredrik Gertten:

Thank you, Sam and Leilani and Leilani, thank you for your work. So what is your idea with this, these directives and this podcast series, you really want people to use this? We

Leilani Farha:

really do and and the directives have been out for a little while, and we didn't have an opportunity to really promote them and do anything with them. And we really feel now is the time financialization of housing just continues on and on and on. It's not getting better, and there's a way in which I think now is the time because people are starting to really wake up and realize this is not sustainable. Tenants are waging battles around the world on this so now is a really good time to arm them with human rights

Fredrik Gertten:

and friends. Listeners, if you liked this episode, if you think our work is important, please tell your friends. Text them, tell them to listen to the podcast. Also, please go in and rate the podcast. Make some reviews. All this is helping us to get a bigger audience. And, you know, we we do all of this out of passion, but we, of course, want to reach as far as possible. That's why we have this, amazing people like Leilani and Sam and Kirsten working on this so we can fight back, push back. That's what we are about.

Leilani Farha:

It is, thanks. Fredrik,

Fredrik Gertten:

see you soon. Leilani,

Kirsten McRae:

Pushback Talks is produced by WG Film. To support the podcast, become a patron by going to patreon.com/pushbacktalks. follow us on social media at make underscore the shift and push underscore the film. Or check out our websites, maketheshift.org, pushthefilm.com, or breakingsocialfilm.com