Tenants of financialized landlords in high-income, majority-Black Toronto neighbourhoods faced 33 eviction applications per 100 households from 2016 to 2019 — a rate five times higher than the city average for that landlords group of 5.6 per 100 households, a new study has found.
“Financialized landlords” in the study refers to asset managers, real estate investment trusts, family conglomerates and “financialized property managers” focused on maximizing the value of portfolio assets for investors.
The report conducted by researchers at Toronto Metropolitan University, funded in part by the Canadian government and published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, draws from more than 100,000 formal eviction filings for purpose-built rental apartments in Toronto from 2016 through 2021.
It found renters in Black-majority neighbourhoods experience “disproportionately high rates of housing instability and eviction filings by financialized landlords” and argues “profit-driven motives systematically undermine Black lives and spaces.”
From 2016 to 2019, eviction rates in Black-majority areas, “regardless of income level, were significantly higher than in other racial/ethnocultural groups, with few exceptions.”
The eviction-application rate in high-income, majority-Black neighbourhoods was more than double the rate of 14 per cent in low-income, majority-Black neighbourhoods from 2016 to 2019, the report found.
The study categorized neighbourhoods as “low-income” or “high-income” depending on whether the areas had median renter household after-tax incomes above or below the Toronto renter median for the census year ($42,000 for 2016 and $57,600 for 2021).
Lead researcher Nemoy Lewis, an assistant professor at TMU’s School of Urban and Regional Planning, said this finding challenges common assumptions about evictions.
“That stark difference tells us that eviction isn’t about who’s the poorest in our city,” he said. “It’s about where corporate landlords operate, how they manage, and which communities are most exposed to some of the most aggressive rent enforcement.”
It also shows “income doesn’t protect Black renters,” Lewis said.
There were fewer eviction applications at the onset of the pandemic — in 2020 and 2021 — but the report found the same pattern. The city average for financialized landlords was a rate of 2.8 per cent, while low-income Black communities had a rate of 6.6 per cent and high-income Black communities had a rate of 8.5 per cent.
With the continued commodification of rental housing, “Black renters face greater marginalization, exclusion from stable housing and vulnerability to displacement and gentrification,” the report argues.
A small number of buildings in the city’s northwest are in higher-income, Black-majority areas and face “extremely high eviction rates” yearly, the report said. And while financialized landlords generally filed to evict at a higher rate in low-income areas than high-income areas, Black-majority areas were an exception.
The highest rate of eviction applications among financialized landlords from 2016 to 2021 was recorded at 2737 Kipling Ave., north of Finch Avenue West, a 416-unit building with 72.5 per cent Black households, at a rate of 36.6 per cent. The apartment building was sold to Starlight Investments in 2018.
From 2016 to 2019, Starlight, Toronto’s largest private landlord, filed to evict 12.4 per cent of households across its Toronto portfolio and the rate was “substantially higher” in high-income, Black-majority areas, at 36.6 per cent, the report said.
Penny Colomvakos, Starlight’s senior vice-president of residential operations and communications, told the Star in a statement that Starlight “is committed to providing stable, high-quality housing for residents” across its diverse communities, and it “fundamentally” disagrees with how the filings are characterized in the study.
“Approximately 99 per cent of Starlight’s applications before the Landlord and Tenant Board relate solely to unpaid rent,” Colomvakos said. “These applications are not evictions, and they do not equate to displacement. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, these matters are resolved through payment arrangements, and the tenancy continues.”
Starlight complies with the Residential Tenancies Act, regardless of neighbourhood demographics, it said.
Tony Irwin, president of the Federation of Rental-housing Providers of Ontario, told the Star in a statement that “rental data is best understood alongside the broader conditions that shape how housing operates in practice.”
It echoed that filings don’t necessarily result in eviction.
“These situations can be stressful and uncertain for all involved, which is why early resolution matters,” the statement reads. “FRPO members take proactive steps to address issues and support the continuation of the tenancy. In many cases, this leads to repayment arrangements or other resolutions that allow residents to remain housed, with eviction used only as a last resort.”
Lewis said financialized landlords’ fiduciary responsibility to prioritize returns for investors, however, causes eviction to become “a business tool, rather than a last resort.”
This obligation doesn’t exist “in a vacuum,” he said, but in a housing market shaped by a long history of racial exclusion, and where Black renters “absorb the pressure.”
He emphasized “there’s nothing illegal” about these practices, but “the rules and the systems we built produce those racialized outcomes that we are documenting through the study.”
