Tag: Tenant Organizing

The Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board’s “digital-first” hearing model is silencing tenants and helping landlords evict them.

As COVID fanned the flames of Toronto’s preexisting housing crisis, the Keep Your Rent posters on every block were a reminder that, all around me, there were people fighting for the soul of the city I grew up in. 

A six-page comic about Keep Your Rent’s tenant organizing in Toronto during eight months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Whose interests guide the state apparatus that sets the parameters of city development? Yutaka Dirks reviews Samuel Stein’s Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State.

Mega-landlord Timbercreek owns half of one of the poorest and most racialized neighbourhoods in Ottawa – and they’re evicting over 400 residents to build a new “resort-style apartment” complex. But tenants are organizing from the grassroots and fighting to save Heron Gate.

Tenants in Toronto have long been exploited by landlords imposing skyrocketing rent increases. Organizers have just secured a victory – and there’s more to come.

Through strategic organizing, tenants can win increased legal protections from eviction, funding for new social housing, and, eventually, the full control of their own homes. In concert with other movements, these efforts can help build the organizing skills and collective power that are necessary to challenge a political and economic system that privileges property and those who own it above all else.