Nowhere to Go: Examining the Relationship Between Evictions and Homelessness in Toronto


Sophie O'Manique, The Canadian Centre for Housing Rights, and the Graduate Center, The City University of New York; Jeremy Wildeman, Canadian Centre for Housing Rights; Jon Paul Mathias, Canadian Centre for Housing Rights

The government of Canada has recognized that adequate housing is a fundamental human right and is essential to living a life with dignity. However, the universal realization of this right in Canada is increasingly elusive, as housing costs across the country skyrocket and become wildly out of step with wages. For low-income people, a housing crisis persisted long before it was acknowledged by politicians and the media. Currently, however, an increasing number of people are forced to live in highly precarious and life-threatening conditions, including a professional, middle class of workers once unaffected by the crisis, and with many more people now experiencing persistent homelessness. As larger and more affluent swathes of the population are affected by Canada’s housing affordability crisis, concern among policy makers and middle-income people has grown. Despite this growing concern, Canadian cities continue to evict tenants at shockingly high rates, with 12% of Canadian tenants having reported facing eviction in the past (Statistics Canada, 2021). This paper demonstrates that homelessness in Toronto, and Canada more broadly, is not a failure of governance, but is rather a policy choice pursued by different levels of government. In research conducted at the Canadian Centre for Housing Rights (CCHR), and in CCHR’s provision of services to tenants, our researchers have observed how eviction courts and informal eviction proceedings render people homeless every day. Citing examples from several research studies conducted by CCHR in 2022-24, this paper examines how formal eviction filings and informal eviction processes in Toronto are producing favourable outcomes for private housing providers while actively producing homelessness amidst an already profound housing crisis. This paper understands these dynamics as part of a mode of neoliberal urban governance that converts spaces of social production and reproduction into spaces of profit through displacement and resettlement (Chatterjee 2014, p. 6). This paper argues that rental housing regulations and eviction procedures in Toronto act as a state-sanctioned mode of spatial governance that makes housing more profitable for private housing providers while rendering tenants terminally precariously housed or homeless. This paper draws on an analysis of formal eviction filings; on interviews with service providers working in emergency shelters and eviction prevention programming in Toronto; and on surveys of Toronto tenants. This paper uses a social reproduction framework to consider how certain groups in Toronto are disproportionately relegated to precarious tenancies and are excluded from both the home ownership market and adequate and affordable housing in the private rental market. Social reproduction theory works to understand the relationship between production and the life-making processes that enable production. Social reproduction theorists contend that differences along the lines of class, race, gender, sexuality, family structure, immigration status and disability are produced and reproduced to be taken advantage of by capitalist forces - as capitalism requires the stratification of working people for its survival (Bhattacharya 2017, Arruzza 2016, Katz 2001). In examining marginalized groups are uniquely vulnerable to formal and informal evictions, this paper argues that formal and informal eviction processes work to reproduce differences along the line of race, gender, sexuality, family structure, immigration status and disability, to maintain a class of people who are relegated to long term housing insecurity and homelessness.

This paper will be presented at the following session: