When we discuss evictions in Canada, we typically focus on formal evictions—the legal process that landlords move through to obtain an order of possession. But what if an eviction is not a singular legal event? What if it begins long before a formal eviction filing, and continues well after a tenant has vacated through debt, fear, and bureaucratic pressure?

New research by Dr. Nemoy Lewis and Dimitri Panou, published in Geoforum, examines the lived experiences of Black newcomer tenants, primarily Nigerian refugees, in four apartment buildings on Chalkfarm Drive in northwest Toronto. Their study reveals how one financialized landlord, Greenwin Inc., used eviction threats, chronic disrepair, and predatory post-tenancy billing as interconnected mechanisms of racialized extraction, capturing value not only through rent and filings, but through the afterlife of tenancy itself.

The findings resonate with recent BSH research with a focus on Ontario, including the Filling the Gaps report and studies on above-guideline-increases. They also complement Lewis’ recent study on eviction filing patterns entitled, Financialized Violence in Toronto’s Rental Market: Eviction Rates in Majority Black Renter Communities. Together, this research shows that evictions are not evenly distributed: they are concentrated in Black communities and amplified by financialized landlords and the extractive practices they normalize.  

Key Findings 

Eviction as Infrastructure: Governing Through Fear

Between October 2014 and December 2021, Greenwin filed 2,675 formal eviction applications across the four Chalkfarm buildings—an average of 381 per year in a 1,215-unit complex. Seventy-five percent (2,004) were L1 applications for non-payment of rent, including cases for arrears as low as $73. Eviction filing intensified immediately after acquisition: applications increased 176% from 164 in the fall of 2014 to 453 in the winter of 2015. Rather than a rare, last-resort response, filings functioned as routine property management, an infrastructure of governance that disciplines tenants through the persistent threat of removal, even when the alleged arrears are minimal.

As one resident explained:

“Any little thing, they [management] just threaten you that they’re gonna come to throw you out […] so I get worried when it’s getting to the time to pay rent.”

Why this matters: When landlords use eviction applications as a threat, tenants are not simply worried about losing their housing, it becomes a disciplinary technology. The ever-present possibility of an application produces what the authors describe as an ambient fear:  a low-grade, continuous threat of eviction that shapes tenants’ day-to-day decisions, discourages repair requests they are entitled to make, and normalize silence as a survival strategy. Lewis and Panou frame this as “eviction as infrastructure”—an ongoing system of governance through threat, fear and extraction, rather than a set of isolated legal outcomes.

Post-Tenancy Extraction: The Hidden Mechanism

Greenwin’s extraction did not end when tenants left. Every former resident interviewed (n=15) reported receiving post-tenancy bills ranging from $2,000 to $13,000 upon ending their tenancy. Tenants described the alleged ‘damages’ as vague, inflated, and often unsubstantiated, including charges that blurred ordinary wear and tear and, in some cases, included pre-existing damages that tenants had documented and reported at move-in. One tenant, for example, was billed nearly $2,000 for damages they had documented and reported shortly after they first moved in. As one former resident put it: “Everybody that leave[s] there must pass through this process.”

Why this matters: Post-tenancy billing operates in the grey zone, rarely visible in eviction data or policy debates, yet deeply coercive in practice. Tenants reported that unpaid invoices were typically given two weeks before being outsources to Suite Excel Collections Canada Inc., and participants described collection calls that included being told they had no legal recourse and being pressured to pay quickly to avoid further consequences. Some tenants paid despite believing the charges were unjust, explicitly citing fear that conflict could affect their immigration status in the country.

Lewis and Panu situate this as expropriation in sociologist Nancy Fraser sense: a mode of confiscation that works outside the bounds of legal reciprocity, targeting people structurally positioned with fewer protections and fewer realistic avenues for challenge.

Predatory Inclusion and Constrained Settlement

The concentration of Nigerian refugees renter households at Chalkfarm was not an organic “clustering” story, it was structurally produced through discrimination, limited alternatives, and the racialized sorting of newcomers into a narrow set of viable rental options. Every participant described being rejected by multiple landlords. Chalkfarm was the only place that accepted them, despite having no Canadian rental history, or credit scores. Census data mirrors this concentration: 46% of recent immigrants (2016–2021) in the dissemination area encompassing the Chalkfarm towers were Nigerian-born, and 38% of immigrants living in the same DA (19820-2021) were admitted as refugees.

As one tenant explained: “I went to about two, three places, and I wasn’t approved […] people in the shelter were telling me that it’s easier to get the housing [at Chalkfarm].”

Why this matters: This is what Keeanga-Yamahtta Yalor calls “predatory inclusion”—access granted because of vulnerability, on terms that exploit, surveil, and constrain. In the context of Chalkfarm, that inclusion took the form of minimal screening, deteriorating units, and weak tenant protections. Other landlords rejected Nigerian and other applicants from the African diaspora, including Caribbean newcomers outright; Greenwin did not, recognizing their vulnerability and working within extractive terms that kept tenants precarious with the ever present threat of removal.

Organized Abandonment as Racialized Governance

Beyond eviction threats, tenants faced persistent and normalized neglect. When one tenant reported rat infestations, management responded: “Because [you are] African people, you guys cook a lot, and so the food is attracting the rats to you.”

Rather than addressing unsafe living conditions, this response racialized responsibility for disrepair, deflecting the landlord’s duty to maintain habitable housing under Section 20 of Ontario’s Residential Tenancy Act back onto tenants. Participants consistently described differential treatment: concerns raised by white tenants were more likely to receive timely responses, while Black residents’ requests were ignored, delayed, or dismissed.

Why this matters: This pattern reflects what geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore theorizes as “organized abandonment”—the systematic withdrawal of care and protection from racialized communities. Disrepair here is not incidental or purely negligent. It operates as a mode of governance: disciplining tenants through denial, normalizing unsafe conditions, and sustaining extraction by minimizing maintenance cost while keeping residents precarious.

Implications for Security of Tenure

The Chalkfarm case underscores a fundamental truth: legal protections mean little without meaningful enforcement and accessible pathways to exercise them. Black newcomer tenants formally hold the same rights as other Ontario residents, yet these rights were routinely undermined by regulatory gaps, legal complexity, economic precarity, immigration vulnerability, and profound information asymmetries. In practice, “security of tenure” remains aspirational.

Between 2016 and 2021, census areas where Black renters formed the majority experienced eviction filing rates more than five times the citywide average. This is not a coincidence; it is structurally produced. Financialized landlords concentrate disproportionately in neighborhoods with high proportions of Black, newcomer, and refugee tenants, where aggressive filing practices, maintenance neglect, and debt extraction can be leveraged to generate compliance through fear, uncertainty, and disposability.

Tenant Resistance and Black Spatial Praxis

Amid organized abandonment, tenants also resisted. Confronted with unresponsive management, they developed collective pest-control strategies, meticulously documented unsafe conditions, organized with tenant advocacy groups, and refused illegitimate charges despite threats from collection agencies.

These practices reflect what scholars describe as “Black spatial praxis”: everyday acts of care, refusal, and collective survival through which Black communities contest manufactured vulnerability and disposability. Drawing on McKittrick’s work, Lewis and Panou show that these actions are not simply coping mechanisms. They are forms of political practices, ways of asserting presence, dignity, and belonging in spaces structured to marginalize them.  Reclamation in this sense, involves reclaiming both material space and social life: insisting on habitable housing, defending community ties, and asserting tenant right to remain, organize, and be heard.  

What Needs to Change

The findings point to urgent policy needs:

• Regulate post-tenancy practices: Require itemized, evidence-based documentation before any “damages” invoice can be sent to collections; cap or standardize allowable charges; and create a fast, accessible dispute pathways for tenants after departure.
• Strengthen proactive enforcement: Resource Municipal property standards and by-law systems to compel timely repairs, especially where large corporate landlords repeatedly fail to maintain habitable conditions.
• Reduce eviction disciplinary power: Limit serial filing for minor arrears, introduce penalties for abusive filing patterns, and create safe, non-retaliatory reporting mechanism so tenants can request repair without fear of removal.  
• Center racialized accountability (without surveillance): Expand race-informed monitoring and collect immigration-related indicators only through voluntary, anonymized, third-party mechanism –never at the point of rental screening, and report result only in aggregates. 
• Challenge commodification at the root: As long as housing is treated primarily a as a financial asset designed to maximize returns, tenant stability will remain structurally subordinate to profit.

Toward Abolitionist Housing Politics

Dr. Lewis and Panou point toward abolitionist housing politics as a framework for shifting power from landlords to tenants, expanding collective control over housing, and building forms of shared responsibility that depend not on threat, debt, or disposability. This requires more than reforming existing systems; it demands reimaging the relationships between residents and housing through community land trusts, tenant-led governance, decommodification strategies, and reparative approaches.

Chalkfarm tenants show that even within systems designed to extract and displace, collective care and refusal can carve out space for dignity and the right to remain. Their experiences make clear that financialized ownership turns housing into a site of racialized governance, but they also demonstrate that this governance is contested, not total.

True housing security then cannot be reduced to procedural protection alone. It requires centering those most impacted, confronting the racial violence embedded in our housing systems, and building futures where home is a site of collective care, not an opportunity for extraction.

Learn More

Read the full open-access article on Geoforum: Lewis, N.K., & Panou, D. (2026). Expropriation and Refusal: Black Tenants, Racial Capitalism, and the Struggle for Home at Chalkfarm Drive. Geoforum.

To learn more about the Balanced Supply of Housing’s Evictions and Security of Tenure research project, visit our webpage.

The Balanced Supply of Housing is a SSHRC-CMHC funded, community-based research project at UBC that focuses on land use and housing financialization across Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal.