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The rent strikes making headlines in Toronto are the result of one force: tenant organizing.
Across Canada, tenants today are organizing, building communities and solidary networks, taking on abusive landlords, opposing rent increases, demanding repairs, resisting evictions, and blocking redevelopment and displacement plans. Thousands of tenants do this every day, before and after work, on weekends, with a child in one arm and a pot on the stove. They organize in tenant unions, neighbourhood groups, comités logement, and tenant-based coalitions.
In the words of Bruno Dobrusin, a York South-Weston Tenant Union member, “We either organize ourselves and confront landlords, or we succumb to their whims; no one is coming [to help us].”
Tenant groups organize to build power to defend the interests of tenants and working-class families against landlords—and the political system that backs them up.
Rent-striking the REIT
The growth of real estate investment trusts (REITs)—companies that pool capital from investors in order to buy up real estate—poses challenges and opportunities for tenant organizing. On the one hand, the economic strength of financial investors takes the unequal power dynamics between tenants and landlords to another level; the sheer number of resources a REIT can deploy in any, and every, dispute with tenants is unmatchable. On the other hand, REITs rely on a good public profile to sell shares to investors: bad press in one building can affect an entire portfolio, making these landlords vulnerable to bad press in ways other landlords are not. REITs also become predictable as their actions against tenants in one place are shared with tenants elsewhere, which helps organizers to plan.
Tenants in Hamilton organized a rent strike in buildings owned by one of the country’s largest REITs. In 2017, InterRent bought four buildings in Riverdale, a neighbourhood that has long served as a destination for immigrant families. The high cost of housing in Toronto and transportation improvements that make commuting to the big city easier have made Riverdale an ideal target for gentrification. Soon after the acquisition, InterRent announced a nine-per-cent rent increase. The seven-month strike that ensued “was an intense roller-coaster ride for tenants as well as organizers with ups and downs, thrills and scares, joy and fatigue,” Hamilton Tenants Solidarity Network (HTSN) organizer Emily Power and University of Toronto postdoctoral fellow Bjarke Skærlund Risager wrote in an article for Radical Housing Journal.
In the months leading up to the strike, HTSN canvassed the four buildings (618 units) InterRent had just bought, collecting information about the tenants (languages spoken, for example), recent rent increases, and above-guideline rent increase (AGI) applications. They also assessed people’s interest in participating in committee meetings.
Meanwhile, HTSN sought legal advice on the potential consequences of withholding rent. They treaded carefully, and, in the end, no tenant was displaced due to the strike.
“Tenants celebrated the launch of the rent strike by sharing a potluck meal at the local park, marching through the neighbourhood, making speeches, and dropping a large ‘RENT STRIKE!’ banner from the top floor of one of the buildings,” Power and Risager wrote.
“In the strike’s first month, tenants held a rally and delivered a large stack of work-order forms to the property manager’s office, documenting a slew of longstanding maintenance issues in their apartments and demanding that they be addressed. In June [2018], tenants travelled to the financial district in Toronto to visit the office of CI Financial, the largest investor in InterRent, and demanded that the company withdraw its investments in InterRent (which they didn’t do, unfortunately).”
The HTSN member who documented this struggle avowed that the organization underestimated how important it was for InterRent to negotiate within the standard Landlord and Tenant Board framework and not set a precedent by negotiating directly with the rent strikers or succumbing to their demands. In their view, “InterRent seemed intent on crushing the rent strike to set an example for the burgeoning tenant movement in Ontario and to protect their investment strategy.”
Organizers in Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa have also mentioned financial and corporate landlords’ conscious efforts not to set a precedent by caving to tenant demands. While this strategic choice exemplifies their economic might and ability to sustain short-term losses for long-term returns, it is also a sign of their fear that word of tenant power spreads. As with capitalists everywhere, landlords dread the rise of class consciousness.
In the end, the landlord did not drop the rent increase, but the Landlord and Tenant Board approved a reduced AGI. Demands for repairs were also met. “Beyond this, tenants have a renewed sense of dignity and pride in their homes, know more of their neighbours, meet regularly to discuss common concerns and plans of action, and have established a strong basis of trust and solidarity.”
Beyond housing and into city politics
Among tenant groups, the York South-Weston Tenant Union stands out as having active and deliberate involvement with party politics.
Readers who know Toronto will likely recognize the York South-Weston Tenant Union perimetre as the fringe between two worlds: affluent, gentrified downtown neighbourhoods like Bloor West Village; and the city’s inner suburbs, comprised mainly of middle-income detached houses and high-rise apartment buildings, like Rexdale. Toronto’s City Council is roughly divided between progressive downtown councillors and conservative inner-suburb councillors. York South-Weston (YSW) does not easily fit into either camp.
YSW is in a city ward that has had the same councillor since the 1980s when Frances Nunziata was elected councillor and then later the mayor of York. Once York became part of Toronto, she became the area’s Toronto councillor—and the rest is history. Against this backdrop, York South-Weston Tenant Union’s political project includes casting out Nunziata, taking over her seat, and challenging the dominant narrative in city politics that places home-owners as the sole constituency worth listening to.
“Nobody stays in office that long without rewarding supporters and punishing challengers, and that’s what we see here,” York South-Weston Tenant Union members said in written correspondence. “Service providers and traditional community groups mean well, and they have helped tenants in the past, but when push comes to shove, they will not confront the councillor. No matter what she does or how little she does, they don’t confront her for fear of the repercussions. People are afraid of getting on her wrong side. We’re not. Nunziata’s core supporters are the biggest landlords in our area. We know what side she is on, so we have to build alternatives that confront this reality.
“The City has many powers that could be put to use to help tenants. Not sending the police to ‘keep the peace’ during evictions is one of them; regulating rooming houses would also make a difference; ensuring City-subsidized housing is actually affordable would be nice, even if that is not a long-term solution. The city could use the powers of expropriation to put forward more housing capacity for low-income tenants. But when our councillor is siding with landlords and developers, all of this is a nonstarter.”
One of the union’s organizers, Chiara Padovani, ran for council in 2018 and came in third place, with 20 per cent of the votes. She ran again in 2022, receiving 47 per cent of the votes this time, only 94 votes short of beating Nunziata. Another organizer ran in the 2019 federal election, but did not win. YSW organizers usually participate in electoral campaigns—which are extremely taxing on the group—as big-picture power-building efforts and often reiterate the goal of putting YSW on the map.
“We believe that tenants need to have a collective voice and build collective power also in the electoral arena,” Dobrusin, a member of the union, said in an interview. “That’s why, on top of the organizing building by building that we do, we also use elections to organize and politicize tenants, to intervene in debates that will shape the realities we live in. We do this sometimes by running our own tenant candidates and other times by bringing tenant voices to the main issues that are debated in the electoral cycle.
The York South-Weston Tenant Union’s day-to-day focus is similar to that of other tenant groups: challenging rent increases, stopping evictions, getting repairs done, and organizing more buildings.
In the words of Padovani, “We are up against developers and landlords with endless resources; we got to pull together like [labour] unions did; if we don’t, we risk being crushed one at a time.”
When tenant groups come together
Founded in 2017, the city-wide Vancouver Tenants Union (VTU) enlisted more than 2,500 members in only a few years. Tenants can join the union directly as individual members.
Some members are part of local tenant groups and join to connect their group with the broader tenant movement, others come to VTU first, then start local groups with the union’s support. Other members join to contribute to city- and provincial-level political actions led by VTU.
Members hash out priorities for the year at annual general meetings and elect a steering committee. Any member in good standing can vote and run—the suggested annual membership due is $1 per $1,000 of annual income. At the time of writing, there were three active local chapters, and one of them, Mount Pleasant, recently had a large victory.
VTU members described the fight in their own article.
“In the Fall of 2020, renters in Mount Pleasant and Vancouver faced off against the developer PortLiving and won. For years, PortLiving had been rapidly growing their property empire in the neighbourhood, displacing working class tenants as they developed luxury condos along the Broadway Corridor. The tenants of Mount Pleasant had had enough. We took on the developer and their allies in Vancouver city staff knowing that the future of our community was at stake,” they wrote.
“Days into August 2020, longtime residents at Broadway–Carolina facing an eviction on Oct. 1 reached out to the tenants union…With less than six weeks to the eviction, members of the Mount Pleasant Chapter met every Sunday before flyering and postering across the neighbourhood, recruiting residents and retailers to defend the tenants’ homes. Meanwhile, the Union’s Communications Working Group worked tirelessly to collect hundreds of pledges from tenants across Vancouver to join the fight,” the article said.
“After holding the picket from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. three straight days, the tenants won a stay of eviction in the courts [which stops the landlord from executing eviction for a fixed amount of time, giving tenants more time to find and move to another home]. This was a major victory for renters in Vancouver…
“This fight was never just about the homes at Broadway–Carolina. In two months, we fought a hard campaign and took on a major local developer. It’s up to us to keep up the momentum and challenge the unjust policies of the City of Vancouver and the B.C. government that encourage developers like PortLiving to trample on tenants’ rights with impunity,” VTU members concluded.
The historical and current stories of tenant struggles show the continued presence, geographical footprint, and political importance of tenant movements and the landlord class’s readiness to squash tenant organizing efforts.
Going back to before Confederation, during the inter-war and the Great Depression years, in the post-World War II period, during the heyday of urban renewal, and to this date, tenants have organized, fought landlords, and won important concessions from governments. They’ve done so all over the country.
In most cases, landlords activate state protection; they send the cavalry after tenant groups, make them illegal, persecute their organizers, and instill fear in tenants as a way to break class consciousness.
But landlords are never fully successful.
Even when tenants are forced to retreat, organizing continues on other fronts and inspires future fights. Tenant-based class struggle is a part of this country’s story, past and present.
This is an edited excerpt of The Tenant Class by Ricardo Tranjan, out now from Between the Lines.
