Tenants are showing a greater inclination to band together, organize, and take direct, collective action in confronting their landlords. Photo courtesy the Toronto Tenant Union/X.

On Saturday, April 18, close to 300 people crammed into a school basement for a spirited founding convention of the new citywide Toronto Tenant Union (TTU). It was a riveting all-day event, an indicator of the growing momentum in the tenant and housing-justice movement. “Time to organize!” was the theme.

“The Founding Convention of the Toronto Tenant Union marks a bold new chapter, merging our strength, and growing our collective power across the city,” read the convention call. “This isn’t just a meeting, it’s the start of a citywide movement.”

Tenant movements are emerging globally as one of the most significant social movements of our era, demonstrating an ability to unite working-class people across all divides, promote self-organization, and develop a capacity not only to fight back collectively against predatory landlords, but also to win victories.

A wave of tenant organizing and high-profile rent strikes has taken place across Toronto in the past few years. Tenants have formed a variety of unions or associations, sometimes informal, sometimes more structured. Tenants are showing a greater inclination to band together, organize, and take direct, collective action in confronting their landlords.

The grassroots organizing that sprang up during the pandemic contributed to this momentum by boosting community solidarity and social connections. In Toronto, these initiatives included the “Keep Your Rent” campaign launched by Parkdale Organize, mutual aid networks, emergency food support initiatives, peer-based community outreach, and active support for unhoused neighbours and encampments.

The rent strikes across Toronto have been dramatic, all of them occurring in working-class, heavily racialized neighbourhoods. Some lasted well over a year, with virtually all winning gains for tenants. Withholding rent is obviously risky for individual tenants. But people have taken that step believing that their collective power, and the protection of the tenant union, will carry them through.

In 2014, the City of Toronto identified 31 of its 158 neighbourhoods as Neighbourhood Improvement Areas (NIAs). Previously known as “priority neighbourhoods,” these 31 were chosen for targeted improvement based on socio-economic indicators such as low income or lack of services. The majority of these 31 NIAs were in the inner suburbs. The ward of York South-Weston overlaps or contains within it, seven of these 31 NIAs.

Over the decades, various reports, such as United Way’s Poverty by Postal Code (2004), identified Toronto’s inner suburbs as sites of growing levels of poverty, with few employment opportunities, few programs for youth, poor transit, inadequate housing, an influx of newer immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, and an overall lack of services to meet the needs of residents.

David Hulchanski of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Urban and Community Studies has shown how Toronto became more and more segregated by income, social status, and ethno-racial origin, with increased poverty concentration in the inner suburbs and in a handful of low-income neighbourhoods that remain in the downtown core. His 2006 report The Suburbanization of the “Non-Gentry”: The Impoverishment and Racialization of Toronto’s Inner Suburbs documented how low-income and non-white Torontonians have been squeezed into the city’s least desirable urban spaces as gentrification swept the city core.

Toronto’s much celebrated ethnic diversity is a reality largely in these neglected and under-resourced parts of the city, where a highly diverse, racialized working-class is the majority.

Financialization and unaffordability

Toronto is now the most expensive city in Canada. Home ownership is out of reach for the vast majority of working-class people, and the number of renters in the city is growing at double the rate of home purchasers. Toronto is on the verge of joining Vancouver and Montréal as cities that have a tenant majority. Across the country, 34 percent of people now live in rental accommodation.

Being a tenant in Toronto is also increasingly unaffordable. Average rents have climbed over 100 percent in just the past decade. The average monthly rent for a one-bedroom unit is now in the range of $2,300-$2,590. A 2025 survey revealed that more than a third of Toronto’s renters were spending more than half their income on rent.

Over 105,000 households are on the waiting list for subsidized housing in Toronto. Province-wide, the figure is 300,000. The waiting period for a subsidized one-bedroom apartment in Toronto is 14 years.

The share of Toronto’s housing stock which is non-market is currently at a dismal 4.5 percent and it continues to decline. Canada is losing far more affordable housing than is being built.

Many working-class and poor people are being forced to pay an exorbitant portion of their incomes on rent, often for low-quality and inadequate housing. The impact of this is hardest for low-wage and precarious workers, newcomers, and those on fixed incomes: social assistance, disability benefits, and public pensions. A shocking 44 percent of Canadians are spending more than a third of their income on rent while 15 percent are spending more than half.

Ideally, the place we call home should be an environment where we can thrive as individuals and families. Instead, for many, the unaffordability of market-supplied housing has turned “home” into a financial headache, a source of anxiety, stress, and exploitation.

The personal impact on residents is especially hard for those who have a corporate landlord. Today’s landlords are often predatory corporate entities whose singular goal is to maximize profits. Behind those often-nameless entities are REITS, speculators, asset managers, finance capital, even workers’ own pension funds. Their loyalty is to their investors, not to tenants or communities. They often care little about the proper maintenance of the buildings they own or manage.

Leilana........

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