Pamela Smith did not expect to go viral for telling a story she wished she had never had to live. But when the Black homeschooling advocate and creator behind @blackhomeeducators posted a two-minute video describing her family’s struggle to secure housing in Calgary, her words hit a nerve on both sides of the U.S.–Canada border.
“A few months ago people threw stones when I said housing discrimination is a reality all over North America,” she wrote. The pushback she received then—that doesn’t happen here, not in Canada—now reads like painful foreshadowing.
In the accompanying Instagram video, Smith walks viewers through what she says should have been a straightforward process: finding a short-term rental for her family of five while on an extended visitor visa. Instead, she says, the experience revealed how quickly doors close when the prospective tenant is a Black woman—even one with impeccable qualifications.
Smith says she and her husband presented every document a landlord could hope for: an excellent rental history in Canada, proof of steady income, credit scores she described as “excellent,” a reference from their current landlord, and even a bank statement showing over $250,000 CAD in liquid funds.
“Do you know how many houses I have looked at in the past week?” she asks in the video. “And how many realtors—once they saw that I was a Black woman—how their whole demeanor changed?”
She says the shift was immediate. Cold voices. Delayed replies. Sudden rejections. Homes in the $3,800 to $5,000 CAD monthly range—well within what she says her family can afford—were suddenly “no longer available.”
One property in Calgary’s Mahogany neighborhood, listed for $5,000 CAD, stood out. Smith says the brokerage firm overseeing it brushed her off outright, despite the thick folder of documentation she provided.
“They would rather those houses sit on the market during winter than have a Black family in that neighborhood,” she says pointedly.
Her account echoes what many discrimination researchers have long argued: that racism in the housing market is often subtle, unspoken and difficult to prove—but deeply consequential. And while Canada markets itself as more welcoming and less racially fraught than the U.S., Smith’s story captures a more complicated truth.
In comments beneath the video, Black viewers—Canadian and American—shared eerily similar experiences: ghosted rental applications, mysteriously “unavailable” homes, and realtors whose friendliness evaporated once they saw the applicant in person.
Others pushed back, insisting something else must have gone wrong. Smith addressed them directly: “If you are not Black…I can already hear white folks: well, it was probably something else.”
Housing discrimination is notoriously difficult to document, but in the U.S., federal testing conducted for decades has shown consistent bias in how Black renters and buyers are treated, even when they have higher incomes and stronger financial profiles. Canada, which lacks federal fair-housing legislation as comprehensive as the U.S. Fair Housing Act, has fewer enforcement tools—and far fewer public cases.
Smith says she plans to go live on Instagram to expand on her experience. Her video has already sparked renewed conversations about anti-Blackness in Canada, a subject often dismissed or minimized.
Whether her story results in policy conversations or industry introspection remains to be seen. For now, Smith wants viewers to understand one thing: her finances weren’t the problem.
The problem, she says bluntly, was her.
