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Abstract
In 2014, spending on home renovations across Canada outstripped spending on actual home purchases. In this article, I explore this rise in renovations spending through a case study of these dynamics in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), a metropolitan region that has experienced extraordinary growth in both house prices and levels of household mortgage debt over the last decade. While cheap mortgage debt has often been considered a key factor facilitating housing exchange and speculation in recent decades, I highlight the significant role that informalized renovations labor has played in these housing market dynamics across the GTA. Combining secondary data on GTA housing sales and renovations activity with in-depth interviews with precarious renovations workers, I contend that renovating has been a key strategy to overcome the crisis of affordability produced by low-interest mortgage debt. Highlighting the central role of renovations labor in reproducing the home as a commodity with either new use or exchange values, I recast strategies of asset wealth-building and house buying in the GTA as ones highly reliant on de-skilled and informalized noncitizen renovations labor. Informed by intersectional feminist scholarship on paid but precarious labor in the home, I offer a partial perspective on the fundamental importance of precarious renovations labor to the political economy of private homeownership.
Acknowledgments
Sincere thanks to Brett Christophers and the three anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful and incisive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also Emily Reid-Musson for her expertise and assistance with the fieldwork for this research. Thanks finally to the generous staff at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the Toronto Real Estate Board, the Canadian Real Estate Association and Statistics Canada. All errors, omissions and shortcomings are the sole responsibility of the author.
Notes
1 Based on yearly national housing sales data provided by the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA, http://www.crea.ca).
2 I define the residential use values of housing most fundamentally in Marxian terms as “the usefulness of a thing” but also as “the material bearer[s]… of exchange values” (Marx Citation1990, 126). Housing is always a complex assemblage of use values, but two specific residential use values are of primary interest in this article: that of shelter and domicile, on the one hand, and that of speculation for household wealth accumulation, on the other. Exchange value, meanwhile is differentiated from price here and is employed as the relation between two commodities (either labor or housing) in the market with differing use values (Marx Citation1990). Residential value, finally, is conceptualized here as the continuum of labor—paid as well as unpaid—that produces and reproduces the home over time as both a socially reproductive space and a commodity on the market.
3 Following Goldring, Berinstein, and Bernhard (Citation2009) and Goldring and Landolt (Citation2013), I use the term precarious noncitizenship to articulate the institutionalized ways in which the capacity to work and live in Canada for specific noncitizens is rendered uncertain by the state, employers, and other intermediaries. In particular, some respondents in this study were prohibited altogether from residing in Canada or taking part in paid work. Other respondents possessed conditional legal status, through participation in such programs as the Federal Skilled Workers Program, which permitted future application for permanent residency but which in the immediate term applied only so long as a particular relationship with a specific employer was upheld. Still others have temporary legal status, through such instruments as the Experience Canada visa, which grants the right to work for two years, after which one’s legal status must be changed or renewed.
4 “Renovations” here is defined as paid activities that might include, but that also go beyond home maintenance, and which make cosmetic or structural alterations to a housing asset for the purpose of increasing its use or exchange value. Overall, I conceptualize residential renovation as a process involving the material replacement of one or more components of a private house. This can include kitchen and bathroom refurbishing, repainting walls, dry-walling and flooring, basement finishing and digging, or the construction of new housing additions and demolition activities to prepare for a large-scale interior renovation.
5 I cite these literatures together merely to mark some of the very broad differences between them and dominant conceptualizations of social reproduction and the state that transect the scholarship on asset-welfare. However, it is equally crucial to recognize the major points of epistemological and theoretical divergence between them about what relations, precisely, are being reproduced and how. There are fundamental differences, for example, between second-wave Euro–American feminist theory on domestic labor that conceptualized women largely as white and middle class; black feminist scholarship on racial capitalism, the sociolegal negation of particular laboring subjects and the geohistoric legacies of enslaved domesticity, reproduction, and violence; queer theoretical interventions highlighting the gender/sexuality matrix and the heteronormative underpinnings of patriarchal households; and de-colonial and anticolonial queer and feminist scholarship on the transnational capitalist geopolitics of social reproductive labor performed both in and outside the home.
6 Specifically, Marx (Citation1967, 326) notes that “whatever the social organisation of the spheres of production promotes, his [the merchant’s] wealth exists always in the form of money, and his money always serves as capital. Its form is always M—C—M’. Money, the independent form of exchange-value, is the point of departure, and increasing the exchange-value an end in itself. Commodity exchange as such and the operations affecting it—separated from production and performed by non-producers—are just a means of increasing wealth not as mere wealth, but as wealth in its most universal social form, as exchange-value.”
7 Others within the industry, such as Caldwell (Citation2013), estimate the informal renovations workforce in Toronto to be closer to double this number.
8 Figures on the size of the formal renovations workforce are taken from Tuckey (Citation2016) and OHBA (Citation2014).
9 I use the term devalued labor in both contrast and complement to Doussard’s (Citation2013) use of degraded labor, to describe the residential construction and day labor industry. The latter illuminates a much wider set of relations that have eroded conditions for renovations and construction labor in the United States, including falling unionization rates and the de-skilling and intensification of the labor process, reduced health and safety conditions, and employment conditions. I use devalued labor to refer more narrowly to the exchange value of informal renovations labor—as a combination of the wages and the benefits paid to renovations workers in this study but also as a fiduciary social relation that is shaped not only by class-capital relations but by institutional legal frameworks (such as immigration channels) and segmentation within the labor market.
10 Even assuming that unionized workers are paying taxes and union dues, and many of those in the informal economy are very likely not, and assuming an average income tax rate of 30 percent, the union and competing nonunion formal-sector wages are still substantially higher. These figures also do not include employee benefits such as pension and employment insurance payments, monetary protections in the case of employer wage theft (for many union members), and other employment-related benefits that unionized workers in the formal sector would receive on top of these wages. In the US context, Doussard (Citation2013) found that contractors using day laborers netted contractors up to 40 percent in wage savings, with additional savings accrued by not paying employee benefits, payroll taxes, and other employment costs.
11 All participants’ names are anonymized.
12 Interview, senior regional supervisor, Ministry of Labour, Toronto, September 11, 2014.
13 Ibid.
14 Interview, independent construction market consultant, Toronto, July 4, 2014.