As rent prices have risen in Toronto, instances of tenants withholding rent in protest have become more common.
It’s called a “rent strike” and it is a practice that has gained widespread attention in the city in recent years, as the cost of a one-bedroom apartment surged to nearly $2.500.
In some cases, tenants use rent strikes to bring attention to poor conditions in their buildings. But for most, it’s a tool used to protest larger rent increases.
‘Nothing is really getting better’: This Toronto park went from zero tents to being the city’s largest homeless encampment. What happened?
Kai Downey does not want to be in a tent in Dufferin Grove Park.
She arrived a few days back, hauling her bright blue tent from her former campsite near Toronto’s lakeshore, after unwanted attention from another person left her feeling scared. The west-end park, a 5.3-hectare expanse of green space across from Dufferin Mall near Bloor Street, meant access to a washroom, a water fountain and basic essentials in the bustling area.
On a sweltering August afternoon, Downey, who is in her early 20s, stood beside her setup in a less populated area near the park’s northern edge, as two outreach workers from a local social service agency made their rounds to hand out water bottles and single-use SPF packets. They asked what she needed. The answer was the same as it’s ever been: housing.
A neighborhood in Portland has spiraled into chaos as the locals clash with those living in a homeless encampment.
Residents in the city’s southeast say the area has become like a ‘war zone’ as tensions continue to rise between locals and the homeless who have lined the streets with tarps and tents.
Lacey, a woman living in the encampment, told KGW8 that someone hit her dog with a car, leaving him with a broken leg and an open gash.
The leaders of Ontario’s largest cities are calling on the provincial government to appoint a cabinet minister to manage a provincewide response to a growing trend of homelessness and a number of encampments they say have reached crisis levels.
Launching a new campaign at Queen’s Park on Thursday, Ontario’s Big City Mayors said local governments were at a breaking point trying to tackle homelessness, opioid addiction and a series of tent encampments that have appeared and stayed in the heart of the province’s towns and cities.
Residents of six mobile-home parks on P.E.I. are worried about how a large buyout of properties across the country will impact them — and a U.S. watchdog group says the change in ownership could mean higher fees.
Last month, the Canadian Apartment Properties Real Estate Investment Trust — or CAPREIT — announced it was selling the six parks on the Island as part of a $740 million deal with TPG Real Estate, a private-equity company based in the U.S.
The sale involves 12,138 residential lots for manufactured mini-homes or mobile homes spread across 75 sites throughout Canada.
This is the world we live in, corporations profiting from the housing shortage caused by Trudeau’s mass immigration scam.
What will become of the Trailer Park boys?
Rents are still rising in Canada but the year-over-year pace of growth has slowed, according to a new report.
The data from Rentals.ca and Urbanation says asking rents for all residential property types averaged $2,201 in July, up 5.9 per cent from last year.
The year-over-year increase is the slowest rise since early 2022, while more recently, growth has often topped 10 per cent, the report said.
A vacant-homes tax may boost housing availability but it hasn’t improved affordability, says a new study on the policy’s impact in Vancouver.
The C.D. Howe Institute study looked at how Vancouver’s Empty Homes Tax has affected the housing crisis since 2017. The tax was introduced amid concerns about high rents, expensive homes, and homelessness happening at the same time as homes were sitting empty, according to the study.
Statistics Canada’s report last week, “Short-term Rentals in the Canadian Housing Market,” reveals that 107,266 housing units were converted to commercial short-term rental (STR) use in 2023, rendering them unavailable for long-term occupancy. Comparing this number to Canada’s current total housing stock of 15,495,361 units, Statscan suggests that a seemingly minor 0.69 per cent of the total housing stock is utilized as commercial STRs.
Smack down of StatsCan’s assumptions.
Alison Rogers and Doug Sykes remember the days when their young children frolicked in the playground at Gage Park.
Having the expansive green space as an extension of their backyard was handy.
“We used to have birthday parties in the park,” Rogers reminisces.
Back then, their biggest concern was that excited, unleashed dogs bounding into the park might pounce on their children, the empty-nesters recall.
For several years, activists and self-styled “advocates” have been attempting to change the way we speak about social problems like homelessness, drug addiction, crime and unsocial behaviour.
The intention is clear: to remove stigma and any overt suggestion of personal responsibility. The new names are meant to reorient our thinking so that we understand that the real causes of misfortune to be societal or systemic. If a word has shameful connotations, that seems to be enough to warrant change. The goal here is to refrain from describing anyone who could plausibly be identified as a victim as having any personal responsibility for their own fate.
Two years and multiple housing laws since the Ford government promised to build 1.5 million new homes in a decade to solve Ontario’s housing crisis, key indicators suggest home construction is grinding to a trickle.
The number of housing starts in the first half of 2024 has lagged behind the previous year, while June saw a 44-per cent drop year-on-year. At the same time, new home sales — which can predict future home construction — are also falling.
And we’re on track to bring in even more foreign students than last year.
Chris Kostav and Shari Keyes may have targets on their backs.
In a hot Toronto real estate market, both tenants are paying well below market rent for their units in a low-rise building in East York.
And now their landlord wants them out. According to their eviction notices, the landlord plans to move family members into both apartments.
LOS ANGELES—In the scrubby Mojave desert north of Los Angeles, a sprawling encampment of decrepit RVs sits just off a dirt road separating the city of Lancaster from Los Angeles County’s unincorporated expanse.
In every direction, garbage spreads out like an algae super bloom—beyond that, endless sand and brush, baking in the summer sun.
“Keep your head on a swivel for dogs,” a member of the city’s public safety and emergency response unit tells us. Through the haze, we see two pit bulls and a German Shepherd under a tarp, but they are tethered, too hot to move.
Bank of Canada (BoC) analysts on Wednesday disputed cabinet claims immigration is an immediate net benefit to the country, and warned the rapidly increasing population is costing Canadians.
Immigrants typically drive up rents, are slow to get a job and contribute “to inflationary pressures in some sectors,” said BoC in a monetary policy report, per Blacklock’s Reporter.
Guy-Émile Beauparlant was born in Montreal but the family moved early and often throughout Quebec to wherever his father found construction work.
Beauparlant left school when he was of working age, embarking on a lifetime of menial jobs. Some he enjoyed, such as climbing trees to hand pick unblemished apples, or working outdoors on a dairy farm. Others he liked less, like roofing the expansive airplane hangars at the St-Hubert airport, or making insulation derived from shredded newspapers — hot, dusty work that clogged his respiratory passages and burnt his eyes.
