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“Fighting to keep your home in a community”: Understanding evictions through service provider and community leader perspectives in North York communities

• Scott Leon, Abinaya Balasubramaniam and Brenda Roche
Key with red house shaped trinket in row of white ones on blue background.

A previous Wellesley Institute study on formal eviction applications in Toronto found that areas with higher proportions of low-income households had 2.5 times higher eviction filing rates. Independent of this association, areas where more Black renters lived had rates that were two times higher. Building on previous work, this latest report explores how local service providers and community leaders understand the causes, impacts, and Black experiences of evictions in neighbourhoods disproportionately impacted by residential eviction filings.

Key Findings

  1. Interviewees identified three main causes of evictions: tenant economic vulnerability, landlord incentives to evict, and discrimination against populations including Black renters.
  2. Five renter populations were identified by interviewees as being disproportionately at risk of and impacted by evictions: low-income renters, Black and racialized people, people with mental health challenges, families with children, and new immigrants.
  3. Evictions were identified as having negative impacts on individuals’ mental and physical health, employment and education, and community relationships. At the community level, evictions were identified as playing a role in the fraying of social, economic, and neighbourhood networks.
    1. Communities across North York and Toronto were described as being fragmented by evictions, including but not limited to networks of neighbours, interpersonal support relationships, and Black community networks.
Understanding evictions through service provider and community leader persepctive in North York communitiesDownload
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Scott Leon

Scott Leon was a research at Wellesley Institute from 2015 to 2022.

Abinaya Balasubramaniam

Abinaya Balasubramaniam

Abinaya Balasubramaniam was a researcher at Wellesley Institute from 2020 to 2025. Prior to joining Wellesley Institute, she worked at the University of Toronto and Women’s College Research Institute. At Wellesley, Abinaya worked in the areas of housing, policing and equity. She holds a Master’s degree in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto, where she focused on mainstream media’s gendered and racialized representations of inner-city neighbourhoods.

Brenda Roche

Brenda Roche

Dr. Brenda Roche is Director of Research at the Wellesley Institute. She was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology and Health at the Gender, Violence and Health Centre of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She comes with academic and community-based research experience exploring social and health issues in urban settings, including homelessness, sexual health, violence and psychological trauma and distress. Her doctorate, through the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, examined discourses on trauma that operate within the context of refugee resettlement, and how these influence health and social care practices for women (and their families) seeking political asylum in the United Kingdom.