I didn’t want to write a story about housing. In Toronto, everybody talks about housing, and nobody does anything about it. But this story isn’t about housing. It’s about Gladys and Leidy.
Gladys Canelas,72, and Leidy Elizondo, 52, live in Oakwood Village. Gladys and her husband are retired. They’ve been living in their building at 1A Bansley Ave for 24 years. Her neighbours, Leidy and her husband have lived here for almost 20 years. Leidy raised her two children in the building. Her second child was born here.
They pay their rent on time. They get along with their neighbours. And they’ve never had a problem with three previous landlords. Landlords seem to buy and sell this building, and the tenants in it, like fruit in a market.
But the latest landlord wants them out. And that landlord isn’t an individual like you and me, it’s a corporation: Family Properties. An Orwellian name for a corporation that’s trying to kick out seniors and a family from their home.
Family Properties took Gladys and Leidy to the tenant-landlord tribunal to evict them, and lost. But the corporation didn’t stop there. Gladys and Leidy have now been served another eviction notice. This time for renovations. But as Gladys and Leidy tell me, they won’t be allowed back.
They’re being renovicted.
Gladys and Leidy don’t want to leave. And they can’t afford to pay the rents outside. They’ve looked, and rents don’t go below $2000 anymore. Plus utilities.
“Our retirement income is too small to pay so much more,” says Gladys. “We feel abandoned. We don’t have someone to help us. We need support. We don’t want to move from here.”
Gladys and Leidy are the longest-term tenants in the building. But instead of being rewarded for decades of paying rent, they’re being booted out. More rent can be extracted from new tenants. The corporation is charging more than double the rent for 2-bedroom apartments like theirs.
“We’re very worried,” Leidy says. “There’s a lot of stress and frustration. We have no support. And going to court is too difficult to win.”
Leidy is right.
Provincial law allows landlords to evict tenants based on extensive repairs or renovations. The City has come up with a new bylaw to stop runaway renovictions, but those changes are coming slow to Toronto.
A vote for the new bylaw to stop renovictions goes to City Hall’s planning and housing committee on October 30. But it will still have to pass a City Council vote and isn’t expected to be enacted until July 2025.
Even still, Gladys and Leidy think it can help them. “The new law is a great hope so we that can stay in our apartments,” says Gladys.
I guess this story is about housing in Toronto, after all.
