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The Corporate Takeover of Canada’s Apartments Is Worse than You Think

Property investors have discovered that getting rid of tenants is very good business

The Corporate Takeover of Canada’s Apartments Is Worse than You Think

Property investors have discovered that getting rid of tenants is very good business

ILLUSTRATION BY ROMAIN LASSER

Published 12:30, SEPTEMBER 10, 2026

Driving around Herongate in Ottawa, I saw the usual signs of a low-income neighbourhood: social housing, worn apartment buildings, modest townhomes. I parked at the plain, low-rise community centre and followed the handwritten “Tenants Meeting →” signs on the cinder-block walls, carried along by lively chatter that led me to a room full of people. Residents had gathered because they were being evicted from their homes. One hundred and five families were at risk—more than 500 people.

The space was packed: elders, parents, young people, children, able-bodied and disabled alike. Later, I would learn that 93 percent of the community was racialized, with roots in Africa, the Arab world, and Asia. This was the most diverse neighbourhood I had ever visited in the city, and its residents were being displaced by Timbercreek—a financial firm dressed up as a landlord, with close to $12 billion under management.

Herongate wasn’t a bedroom community, the kind of place people return to only to sleep after a day’s work in the city. It was a self-sufficient, living community. Residents spoke about networks of care and survival: Somali hagbads had been established to pool savings, and homes doubled as hair salons, clothing boutiques, and child-minding services. Neighbours helped each other secure medical care, use the transit system, and pitched in with translation and tutoring. A mosque was within walking distance, a grocery store catering to their palates down the street. They shared iftars during Ramadan.

Timbercreek had other plans for this neighbourhood. They had purchased Herongate in 2012–13 as an “underperforming asset.” They didn’t consider residents as families with personal histories or important roles in an ecosystem of interdependence. Instead, they were atomized tenants in decrepit housing: a problem to be cleared.

After having neglected maintenance for five years, Timbercreek had a new vision: demolition, a clean slate, and a shiny new development. It would be called Vistas South and linked to a nearby predominantly white neighbourhood, where more than half of the households had an annual income over $100,000. In Herongate, the average annual income was closer to $40,000. Timbercreek’s renderings showed larger buildings, “resort-style” amenities, and streets scrubbed clean of Herongate’s cultures, geographies, and people.

As the meeting progressed, I watched elders entertain children with crayons and scraps of paper and listened to parents worry aloud: Where will we go? My kids go to school here. This is my community!

So there we were, in 2018, in a room full of mostly migrant and refugee families of little means, facing down a billion-dollar financial firm, to save the place where they dwell. The crisis confronting the residents of Herongate didn’t happen overnight. It’s been engineered over decades and enacted through a myriad of housing and political policies that redefine people and determine where and how they live—and whether they can exist at all.

The mess we’ve inherited started with an economist: Milton Friedman. In the 1960s and ’70s, his free-market ideology was considered radical, even fringe. His notion that businesses have no social responsibility, only a duty to increase profits for shareholders, struck many as extreme. But through his writings and frequent television appearances, Friedman popularized the idea that unfettered competition would drive efficiency, innovation, and growth. His philosophy was distinctly misanthropic: pay workers as little as legally possible, minimize corporate taxes, and abandon communities when cheaper labour could be found elsewhere.

This faith in unfettered markets shaped Friedman’s approach to government programs too. With public housing, for example, he argued that the terrible conditions in government-owned housing projects in the US were proof that government couldn’t house people properly. What he didn’t say was that public housing had been deteriorating because Congress and successive administrations had starved it of maintenance funds since the 1960s.

Friedman’s solution wasn’t to fix public housing to protect those who needed it most but to eliminate it altogether. Instead, the government would provide vouchers for poor people to rent housing on the private market. He used the failure created by decades of deliberate underfunding to justify privatization, creating a system that would funnel money from government into the hands of private property owners. This perfectly aligned with his core belief: Let the market sort everything out, even basic human needs.

Margaret........

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