When we think about housing discrimination, we often think of overtly racist policies of the past or individual landlords refusing to rent to certain groups. But new research from BSH researcher Nemoy Lewis, Dimitri Panou, and Richard Maaranen highlight a more structural form of housing injustice: in Toronto’s purpose-built rental market, financialized landlords file eviction applications at significantly higher rates in Black renter-majority neighbourhoods. Between 2016 and 2021, eviction filings were highest in Black-majority areas where corporate landlords dominate, and in some communities the filing rate reached roughly 36 applications per 100 rental units.
This reveals a more insidious form of housing injustice: the systematic targeting of Black communities through eviction practices by financialized landlords, corporate entities and investment firms that treat housing as a financial asset rather than a fundamental human right.
Read the ArticleThe Hidden Pattern of Discrimination
A comprehensive analysis of Toronto’s eviction filings between 2016 and 2021 uncovers a disturbing reality: eviction filing rates are highest in Black-majority neighbourhoods, and financialized landlords are a major driver of that pressure in the purpose-built rental stock. These aren’t mom-and-pop landlords struggling to make ends meet. Many are sophisticated investment firms backed by institutional capital, including public pension funds whose investment strategies are materially entangled with displacement and eviction risk.
Key Findings
Financialized Landlords Pursue Evictions More Aggressively
In the pre-pandemic period (2016-2019), financialized landlords filed eviction applications at a mean rate of 5.62 filings per 100 rental units, compared with 5.07 among private non-financialized landlords. The bigger story, however, is where those filings concentrate: financialized ownership is associated with much higher eviction pressure in Black renter-majority neighbourhoods.
Black Communities Bear the Brunt
In Black-majority, high-income neighbourhoods, financialized landlords 33.25 eviction applications per 100 units per year (2016 and 2019)—nearly six times the citywide average for financialized landlords. Even more troubling, this rate is higher than in Black-majority low-income neighbourhoods (14.36 per 100 units), reversing the usual expectation that eviction pressures is greatest where incomes are lowest. In other words, the pattern is not explained by income alone. By comparison, White-majority, high-income neighbourhoods saw a mean filing rate of 3.59 per 100 units, roughly nine times lower than Black-majority high-income areas.
Starlight Investments: A Case Study in Extraction
One of Toronto’s largest financialized landlords, Starlight Investments, exemplifies these patterns. While the company’s citywide eviction application rate stood at 12.42 per 100 rental units, its rates in Black-majority high-income neighbourhoods rose to 36.6 per 100 in 2016-2019, nearly triple its citywide level.
Between 2016 and 2019, Starlight filed 556 evictions in Black high-income neighbourhoods, with 96% (535) of these being for non-payment of rent (L1 applications). In 202-2021, 99% of Starlight’s 328 filings in higher income Black areas were also L1s. And crucially, even amid multiple stay-at-home orders and eviction moratoriums, the paper shows financialized landlords like Starlight continued to pursue eviction filings, deepening housing precarity during a public health emergency.
Public Housing Provides a Contrast
Interestingly, Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC), the city’s public housing provider, shows a much more even pattern across neighbourhood types. Between 2016-2019, Black low-income neighbourhoods experienced an average eviction filing rate of 3.8 eviction application per 100 rent units, close to the citywide average 3.0. That contrast matters: it shows the private-market gaps are not baked into poverty or “how the system works.” They reflect landlord choices on how aggressively evictions are pursued, and where that pressure is concentrated.
Why This Matters
These findings reveal what the researchers call “financialized violence”: harm produced when housing is treated first as an investment vehicle rather than a place to live. When rental homes are folded in institutional portfolios, including capital linked to pension funds, property management is reorganized around predictable cash flow and performance targets. In practice, that often shows up as tighter rental enforcement and faster turn to eviction filing as a tool to discipline and control, especially in buildings and neighbourhoods where landlords believe tenants have the least power to push back.
This matters for Black renters because it intersects with a longer history of racialized devaluation and extraction in housing markets. Financialization does not replace those dynamics; it scales them. And the researchers’ argument is blunt: anti-Blackness is not a “side-effect” here, rather it helps organize where eviction pressure concentrates and how it becomes normalized as a routine business practice.
Tenant Resistance and Coalition Building
The story does not end with eviction filings. Tenants have pushed back. In Toronto, groups like the York South-Weston Tenant Union and tenant organizers in Thorncliffe Park have led some of the city’s largest and longest rent strikes in recent years. Across multiple buildings, nearly 500 tenants collectively withheld their rents to challenge above-guideline rent increases tied to landlord investment strategies.
These struggles did not stay confined to housing alone. Tenant groups built working alliances with labour unions, environmental justice organizations, and anti-racist groups. Both the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) publicly supported rent strikers, including contributing to legal defense funds for tenants facing eviction.
What these coalitions make visible is a deeper contradiction: landlords often frame “green” retrofits as a public-spirited upgrades, while using them to justify rent hikes that ultimately displace the very communities those environmental improvements are supposed to serve.
Recommendations and the Path Forward
The researchers call for a multi-pronged approach to address financialized violence in housing:
- Break Down Silos and Build Broader Coalitions
Tenant movements should deepen cross-sector alliances with labour, climate justice group, and ant-racist organizations because housing insecurity is not sperate from wage suppression, environmental harm, and racialized governance. These harms travel together; resistance has to as well. - Demand Accountability and Launch Divestment Campaigns
Institutional investors, particularly public pension funds should not be able to bankroll landlord business models that intensify eviction pressure and displacement while remaining insulated from public scrutiny. Pension money is public money in effect: It is built from workers’ contribution, yet the investment chain is often opaque. Housing justice movement can use a divestment playbook that is already familiar successful fossil fuel divestment and migrant justice campaigns: name the investors, trace holdings, and force a reputational and political cost for profiting from displacement. In 2019, reporting showed the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board had held nearly $10 million in two U.S. private prison firms tied to migrant detention; those holdings later disappeared from CPPIB’s disclosure after attention and advocacy pressure. Similar pressure can be directed at pension funds and financial institutions that back corporate landlords whose eviction practices reproduce racialized harm. - Recognize Housing as a Human Right
The core shift here is straight forward: treat housing as a place to live, not a balance-sheet asset. That means putting safeguard in place on the financialization of rental housing and strengthening tenant protection that actually prevents displacement, especially in community that have been targeted for extraction for decades. It also means naming the structure we are up against. Anti-Black racism is not an add-on to housing markets; it helps organize how value is assigned, where risk is offloaded, whose lives are treated as disposable. This is not about values in the abstract. it is about what we choose to protect: landlord revenue streams or people’s ability to remain housed. Treating housing as a human right means drawing a hard line against displacement as a business strategy. And this requires honesty about structure; Anti-Black racism is not an unfortunate by-produce of the market; it shapes where extraction concentrates. Policies framed as colour-blind or universal because they avoid race tend to preserve and often intensify the very geography of harm we are describing.
Conclusion
This research helps to put numbers to what many Black renters in Toronto already know: in financialized rental markets, the threat of eviction becomes a routine mechanism of racialized extraction. The value of the study is not only the scale of evidence, but the clarity of the pattern, where eviction pressure concentrates, and which kinds of landlords drive it.
Tenant organizing is already contesting this reality. The growth of tenant unions and cross-sector coalitions show that collective action can take on corporate landlords backed by institutional capital. But building-level fights are vital as they are but cannot be the endpoint. They have to connect to structural reforms that curb or dismantle financialized extraction and materially reduce displacement.
If we are serious about responding to the housing crisis, we should be asking questions than “how do we build more housing? Who benefits from the system as it exists? Whose security is traded for whose returns? Answering those questions points us towards a different housing politics, one that puts people ahead of portfolios, and treating housing stability as a condition of dignity, and not a reward for market “success.”
For more research on evictions, security of tenure, and the financialization of housing, read more on our project pages:
- Evictions and Security of Tenure
- Filling the Gaps in Housing
- Estimating No-Fault Evictions in Canada
- Gaps Analysis
- Studying Montreal’s Financialization of Multi-Family Rental Housing
- Evictions in Montreal
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.
