A growing number of rental demolitions and redevelopments getting Toronto’s approvals, leaving tenants in a state of limbo
Michael Whitehead knows his time at home is nearly up — but the exact day he’ll need to pack his bags and face Toronto’s rental scene is anyone’s guess.
At 62, he’s spent nearly half his life at 25 St. Mary St — a comfortable, 1960s-era rental tower near Bay and Bloor streets where he secured a two-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment at a manageable price in the mid-1990s. Any day now, though, that familiar life will be thrust into disarray.
The owners of his building have secured city permission to tear it down, with plans to rebuild the 259 rental units alongside 870 new condos on-site. While he and his neighbours have been promised they can move back in at a similar rent when the new building is done, they’ll need to find a place to live in Toronto’s heated market for the years when their home is a construction site.
“You aren’t just getting rid of people’s homes,” Whitehead said in an interview. “There was a community of people that had a relationship with each other.”
Across Toronto, thousands of tenants are facing similar uncertainty, after their buildings were greenlit for demolition. An increasing number of these teardowns are being rubber-stamped — 1,229 units from January to early December 2023 versus 298 in all of 2017 — in the name of providing sleeker, modernized rentals and more homes on the same amount of land.
City bylaws offer some protections for tenants, requiring that anyone tearing down six or more units has to replace them and offer them back to tenants at a similar price. But new data shared with the Star shows only 63 per cent of tenants eligible to return ever do. Over the last three years, of the 179 completed replacement units earmarked for former tenants, just 112 moved back in.
That doesn’t take into account any tenants displaced by demolition who were deemed ineligible for a replacement unit, with another 189 replacement units completed last year not set aside for a specific past renter.
As the city’s population balloons, some experts see this phenomenon as a growing pain — a tradeoff where tenants are displaced with the promise of one day returning, in order to provide more housing stock in dense urban areas. But evident in heated protests that have broken out across Toronto this year, that promise provides little balm to the sting of losing one’s home, as tenants of these buildings are forced to upend their lives for years at a time.
“This has always been the conflict in rental housing,” said David Hulchanski, an expert in housing and social policy with the University of Toronto. “The interest of the owner is separate from the interest of the occupier of the home.”
To U of T’s Matti Siemiatycki, an expert in urban planning and housing development, the growing number of demolition cases also illustrates a bigger question about Toronto’s future — namely, how it can grow and provide the additional housing it needs while balancing protections for existing residents.
“Our city is in flux, and it’s changing, and that is causing upheaval and displacement,” Siemiatycki said, considering the rising numbers. “But we also do have to be able to grow and change, and we do have to be able to intensify.”
‘People have to get on with their lives’
Since the mid-2000s, Toronto has a set of rental preservation rules, which city staff credit with protecting around 5,000 individual homes. Most of the units being eyed for teardowns are affordable ones, making up 59 per cent of units approved for demolition from the start of 2017 to late 2023, city data shows.
Another 35 per cent were leased at mid-range prices. Few demolition projects target high-end rentals, making up five per cent of approvals in that time.
When a demolished rental unit is rebuilt, it must be offered at similar rents for an agreed-upon period — in some cases 10 years, in others 20 — regardless of if it goes to a former tenant or someone new. However, if a former tenant inhabits the unit, the city dictates the annual cost cannot be raised above the provincially set rent control guidelines until they decide to move out.
Looking at the plans for his building specifically, Whitehead sees the benefits promised by developer Tenblock, from 50 new affordable units in addition to the replacement rentals, to a 500-square-metre park and space for a daycare.
He’ll be offered compensation: $2,500 to move out, another $2,500 at the time he moves back in, three months’ rent, and a roughly $700 monthly payment during the displacement to help cover steeper costs. (The three month payment is mandated under the province’s Residential Tenancies Act, while moving allowances and rent gap payments are requirements under city bylaws). Whitehead worries it won’t be enough for a similarly sized unit in his area, requiring him to downsize or change neighbourhoods.
For him, one factor that has him debating whether he will return years down the line is the elimination of parking. In a transit-rich area, the redevelopment won’t offer residents private spaces for their vehicles — a point of concern for Whitehead, who transports work supplies to teach first aid using his car.
City staff, in a statement, listed varied factors that impact someone’s decision to return or not — including changes in family composition or stage of life.
Indeed, across the 12 buildings reoccupied since 2021, return rates varied from 100 per cent of eligible tenants to a single renter settling back down.
Not all former tenants are granted the right of first refusal either — for example, someone is ineligible if they moved into the building after the demolition application was first submitted to city hall. In three of 12 recent reopened sites, zero past tenants were eligible to claim 31 replacement units.
To Hulchanski, the return rate across projects isn’t surprising. “People have to get on with their lives,” he said. The fact that 63 per cent did return, he argued, spoke to the severity of the market, with roughly two thirds of tenants who’d put down roots elsewhere willing to go through that upheaval again.
An uncertain future for those left in flux
About 20 minutes’ walk from the St. Mary Street building, the same developer has been granted permission to tear down a separate rental tower — the 130-unit building at 145 St. George St. where Rebecca Gimmi, 49, has lived in a modest studio apartment for the last 17 years.
She’d chosen deliberately to live in a purpose-built rental tower, after renting units in single-family homes that were later put up for sale, throwing her tenancy into uncertainty. “I thought this was somewhere I could live for a long time,” she said, pointing to cherished features like the wide, sunny balcony where she’s cultivated a kitchen garden of tomatoes and herbs.
But in 2021, a notice was slipped under her door. Like Whitehead, she expects the formal eviction paperwork to arrive sometime next summer, giving her about six months from that point to find somewhere else to live. She worries about the competition of all her neighbours — let alone inhabitants of other similar buildings — hitting the rental scene at once.
She and her neighbours have wrestled with their future plans since the demolition was greenlit. Some have said if they do have to leave, they’ll be gone for good. Others — herself included — are holding onto the prospect of a return.
“You’re kind of banking on a promise in the future,” she said, “that you didn’t sign up for in the first place.”
‘We do have to be able to intensify’
Siemiatycki, the urban planning and development expert, believes the intensification of city land is an important goal — with some alternatives being to build on remaining vacant parcels that often need time-consuming infrastructure upgrades, or seeing more sprawl beyond the city’s boundaries.
But existing tenants’ needs can’t be lost in that process, he said, noting the importance of recognizing people’s ties to their communities.
“This is at the heart of what a city is — a city that’s growing and a city that’s really experiencing profound housing affordability challenges,” Siemiatycki said. “It’s that tension between the power of the neighbourhood — and the local and community ties — and also a need for intensification in order to have more places for people to live.”
On St. Mary St., Tenblock argued to city hall that, as part of its intensification plan, it could improve rental quality while offering more housing than previously existed and public amenities from a daycare space to a new park.
Stephen Job, an executive with Tenblock, told the Star a number of properties under their management date back to Toronto’s mid-century apartment boom. As those properties aged, Job said they were faced with choices about where to repair and retrofit, and where to rebuild entirely. The latter option was especially likely for “tighter downtown locations,” he said, where there wasn’t as much space for infilling with amenities or additions.
“We take our obligations to our tenants seriously,” he wrote, saying the company had agreed to higher rent gap payments and supports for ejected tenants than usually provided in such cases. “Nothing will be as important as how tenants actually feel this process is handled on the ground, though, and we know we have to live up to a high standard when any rental redevelopments proceed.”
While Tenblock has been bound by the city’s rental replacement rules, those rules currently sit on shaky ground. Earlier this year, the province passed a new law allowing it to place restrictions on local rental replacement systems.
It’s a prospect that’s left Toronto city staffers nervous, warning in reports the province could — if it wanted — allow developers to give cash instead of rebuilding lost rental units, or allow units to be replaced at smaller sizes.
The province sees it as a matter of housing revitalization — with a spokesperson for Housing Minister Paul Calandra noting some rental stock is aging or “energy inefficient.” (Tenblock also points to environmental factors in its demolition project documents, arguing in at least two cases that its redevelopments would emit less carbon dioxide.)
“We are exploring the creation of a regulatory framework that would set common rules across municipalities that establish rental replacement by-laws,” government spokesperson Alexandru Cioban wrote on Nov. 30. He stressed no changes to current municipal rental replacement laws had yet been made.
While that uncertainty swirls at the policy level, tenants such as Gimmi stress that even under the current system, the murkiness of their future is what’s hardest to face.
“You feel like you’re in a weird holding pattern,” Gimmi explained. “You’ve already set down roots … you have your doctors nearby, and your bank, all the things you need.”
“To uproot yourself is really significant.”
A different demolition plan
Not every demolition requires tenants to spend interim years elsewhere. In some cases, developers are sketching out staged plans that would have tenants stay in their units until a new building rises next door, then move directly in.
This requires a larger parcel of land than one building, and could be the case for Patti Pokorchak, 69, who is facing a teardown application for her Etobicoke building and four others nearby — 220, 230 and 240 Lake Promenade plus 21 and 31 Park Road — to build two rental towers and three condo buildings.
She’s struggled to reconcile the idea that boosting Toronto’s housing stock means losing what already exists. Looking at the city today, she sees places like the GTA’s aging shopping malls as less disruptive sites for redevelopment than rental towers — noting they’d already have some infrastructure in place.
While the proposal put forward by her building owners, which is still in consultations and has yet to be greenlit by city officials, would not require her to find interim housing, she still fears intangible comforts like her beloved view to Lake Ontario view will be lost when she has to move to the new unit.
In her senior years, she dreads the idea of waiting around for the day she has to move. “I don’t want to live in a construction zone for my 70s,” she said.
“Tell me in what universe it makes sense to destroy housing to make more.”
This article was reported by The Star
