This case study by BSH researchers, Dr. Nemoy Lewis and Dimitri Panou examines the experiences of Black newcomer tenants—primarily Nigerian refugees—living in four apartment buildings on Chalkfarm Drive in northwest Toronto under financialized private ownership. Through in-depth interviews with current and former tenants, the study reveals how eviction threats, chronic disrepair, and post-tenancy debt function as interconnected mechanisms of racialized extraction that extend housing insecurity far beyond formal eviction proceedings.
The research documents how tenants face systematic eviction filings, predatory billing practices—including invoices of several thousand dollars for alleged damages upon vacating units—and ongoing infrastructure neglect. These practices exploit enforcement gaps in municipal property standards and operate within a regulatory environment insufficient to protect vulnerable residents. The paper frames these harms not as isolated mismanagement but as features of a racial capitalist housing order that spatializes and profits from the disposability of Black migrant households.
Conceptually, the work reframes eviction as an ongoing infrastructure of governance embedded in racial capitalism, anti-Black spatial regulation, and organized abandonment. Empirically, it foregrounds how informal coercion and institutional constraints shape everyday precarity while also highlighting tenants’ practices of care, refusal, and collective survival as forms of Black spatial praxis and abolitionist housing politics. The study calls for frameworks that dismantle landlord power and build pathways toward collective ownership and tenant self-determination.
Read the Article
