Corporate landlords in Toronto filed eviction applications at 33.25 per 100 rental units a year in Black-majority, higher-income neighbourhoods between 2016 and 2019, according to a peer-reviewed study. In white-majority, higher-income neighbourhoods, the average rate was 3.59. Those are applications to the province’s tenant tribunal, not evictions, but the gap is nine to one.
The study, published in May in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, is by Nemoy Lewis, Dimitri Panou and Richard Maaranen. It looked at filings with Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board in Toronto’s purpose-built rental market from 2016 to 2021. Its finding, as summarized by the research project behind it: “eviction filings were highest in Black-majority areas where corporate landlords dominate, and in some communities the filing rate reached roughly 36 applications per 100 rental units.”
The authors call these owners “financialized” landlords: companies and investment firms, including those backed by institutional money such as pension funds, that treat rental housing mainly as a financial asset. Renters in Black-majority neighbourhoods were nearly twice as likely to receive a filing from one of them as renters in other racialized, renter-majority neighbourhoods, the project reports.
Income does not explain it. The 33.25 rate in Black-majority, higher-income neighbourhoods is more than double the 14.36 in Black-majority, lower-income ones. Across the city, financialized landlords filed at a mean of 5.62 per 100 units in 2016 to 2019, against 5.07 for private landlords that are not financialized. The citywide difference is small. The concentration in Black neighbourhoods is not.
One landlord, one pattern
The study uses Starlight Investments as a case. In Black-majority, higher-income neighbourhoods, its filings ran at 36.6 per 100 units in 2016 to 2019, nearly triple its citywide level, according to the project’s summary. Starlight filed 556 applications in those areas, and 535 of them, or 96%, were for non-payment of rent. The Toronto Community Housing Corporation, the public landlord, filed at 3.8 per 100 units in Black-majority, lower-income areas, close to its citywide 3.0.
The research cannot show why a landlord files. It shows where.
What the numbers do not say
A filing is a landlord’s request to the tribunal. The data counts applications, not tenants who were ordered out or who left, and it does not show how each case ended. Most filings are for non-payment, so a filing can reflect a tenant who fell behind. The period ends in 2021, it covers purpose-built rentals only, and the published summary does not say where the authors draw the line for a “Black-majority” neighbourhood.
Breach Media reported the case of Carl and Olliver Henry, who in January 2025 nearly faced eviction at 33 King Street, owned by Dream Unlimited, over a rent payment one penny short. Breach’s account carries no response from the landlord.
What the study does establish is a pattern that landlords’ own paperwork produced: in the buildings that Black renters live in, the companies with the most capital behind them go to the tribunal most often. The authors urge tenant coalitions, pressure on the pension funds that back these landlords, and rules that treat housing as a human right. Ontario could start with something simpler: publish every year who files, where and how often, so that no one has to wait for a journal to learn it.
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