Between House and Home: Renovations Labor and the Production of Residential Value

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.