Announcing Squeezed Out, a Community-Based Research Zine about Housing Affordability

Squeezed Out is an arts‑based, community‑engaged research project that challenges the dominant narrative of a Canadian “housing crisis” by centering the lived experiences and knowledge of low‑income tenants in amiskwaciwâskahikan – ᐊᒥᐢᑲᐧᒋᐋᐧᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ – Edmonton. Drawing on collaborative workshops with nine co‑researchers, the study argues that the housing system is functioning as designed: to prioritize profit, private property, and settler-colonial logics over human dignity. Rather than a singular crisis of supply or affordability, the research reframes the issue through tenant epistemologies — ways of knowing developed through lived experience — and identifies four interconnected crises shaping tenants’ lives: colonization, unmet needs, tenants’ rights, and homelessness. The work situates contemporary housing insecurity within histories of land theft, domicide, and financialization, emphasizing how Indigenous people, renters, and people with low incomes are disproportionately displaced, exploited, and perpetually experiencing precarity in their housing.

Through storytelling, collage, and dialogue, tenants describe housing as far more than the cost of rent, highlighting affordability beyond rent, accessibility and aging in place, community and belonging, safety, and mental health. The research documents systemic power imbalances between landlords and tenants, widespread discrimination and stigma, housing neglect, and the constant threat of eviction that drives homelessness. While acknowledging policy efforts such as Canada’s National Housing Strategy, the project finds that meaningful change requires a deeper shift away from market‑driven models toward person‑centred, rights‑based approaches. The study concludes that people with lived experience must be embedded as co‑designers of housing systems and policy, and that arts‑based, participatory research and tenant organizing are powerful tools for resistance, healing, and transformation, reasserting housing as a collective human right rather than a commodity.

Squeezed Out is a zine by David Prodan.