The evening of May 30 is a nice one for a barbecue in Toronto’s High Park neighbourhood. Children play with balloons, and dogs browse at the end of leashes as people crew a host of grills and fill their plates. Someone hands out free raffle tickets. Two people play with balloon swords. Conversation swirls around, groups of people uniting and then dispersing.
“We’re moving,” one woman says to her table, who make understanding noises. When TVO Today catches up with her later, tenant Maija Langins says that GWL Realty Advisors is raising her rent by 11 per cent this year. Langins currently pays a little less than $2,600 for her two-bedroom apartment, she says, and a further $150 for a parking space. With the increase, she’d be paying over $3,000 in rent for her unit and parking.
GWLRA is part of the Canada Life insurance company, which is itself owned by Great-West Lifeco. It operates Livmore High Park and more than 100 other properties that make money for investors in the Great-West Life Canadian Real Estate Investment Fund No. 1 and London Life.
Three thousand dollars a month isn’t on the table for the single parent, who is a kindergarten teacher. So she’s moving herself and her daughter back in with her mom, who lives locally. That’ll allow her to stay in a neighbourhood she likes and where her daughter goes to school. The rent increases “literally kicked us out,” she says.
The tenants of Livmore High Park — two buildings that stand almost directly beside High Park subway station — have spent the past few years, since the COVID-19 rent freeze was lifted, confronting a shared problem: impossible-to-predict rent increases that add as much as hundreds to each month’s costs.
This barbecue, which was organized by the Livmore High Park Tenants’ Association, is a show of solidarity. It was planned to coincide with a meeting between the tenants’ association and GWLRA. But at 6:34 p.m. the night before, an email cancelling the meeting arrived in the association’s inbox, organizer Ben Scott tells me.
“We were disappointed to learn that LHPTA has scheduled a community bbq event to coincide with our meeting as a way of demonstrating to us how ‘organized, strong, and positive’ your association is,” the email read. “We are concerned that this ‘planned demonstration’ may distract from the purpose of our meeting and puts our employees in an unacceptable and potentially hostile environment.”
TVO Today verified the email on Scott’s phone. He says that no demonstration was planned for the event — just a barbecue with some signs put up to illustrate the purpose of the gathering. The meeting would have been the second between the association and GWLRA representatives. The tenants’ association released what Scott describes as “detailed minutes” of the first meeting, which took place on April 27.
(Kat Eschner)
“The plan was to meet with them today to tell them what tenants responded back to them with,” he says, adding that the big issue is the landlord’s refusal to negotiate rent increases on a collective rather than an individual basis.
“Tenants have rejected GWLRA’s refusal to negotiate collectively,” Scott says. Its grounds are that it can’t discuss tenants’ personal information with others. “We’re not asking you to share personal information,” he says. “We’re asking you to give a fair deal to everyone.”
In an email to TVO Today following the barbecue, GWLRA reiterated the same basic message as that sent to the association. “However, we were disappointed to learn that the LHPTA scheduled an organized demonstration to coincide with our meeting,” it said in an unattributed statement. “We also later learned that the local member of provincial parliament and the media would be in attendance.” (Parkdale-High Park MPP Bhutila Karpoche made a stop by early in the evening, and TVO Today was the only media at the event.)
Ben Scott stands on a picnic table to read GWLRA’s email. (Kat Eschner)
Tenants say the irregularity of different units’ valuations and the unpredictability of rental-increase amounts are major issues. During one interview, two people who live just one floor apart and one unit over from each other discover they’re paying vastly different amounts for the same size unit even though they moved in just one month apart.
James Cash, a software developer with Bloom Ventures, and his wife, Amanda Santos, say they pay around $2,300 for a two-bedroom unit after two consecutive rent increases. The most recent offer the couple —who are expecting a child — received was around 7 per cent if the tenants signed a new lease or 11.5 per cent if they went month to month, he says. They signed a lease. “It’s less about the absolute amount and more just not knowing what’s going to happen next year,” he says. “Is it going to be 10 per cent? Are they going to say 50 per cent? Is it 500 per cent?”
Conor Hanlon, who does communications for the Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, says he pays $2,650 for the two-bedroom unit he shares with his partner. The unit is one floor higher than Cash’s. Hanlon says he didn’t realize the difference in their rents. “I'm actually really surprised that he got that rate,” he says. “That's pretty good.”
Constantine Rhaich’al rents a two-bedroom Livmore unit for himself and his two children, Olivia and Josh. (Kat Eschner)
As far as the Livmore tenants can determine, they’ve been approached with rent increases between about 6 per cent and 14 per cent. But nobody seems to be offered the same amount, and even units that seem similar are being rented for entirely different prices and receiving different rent increases. (One reason for this may be that GWLRA uses YieldStar, a pricing algorithm that a recent ProPublica investigation found was driving up rents; its owner, a Texas company called RealPage, is as of March 2023 still under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.)
Their hope, organizer Cynthia Black tells me, is that GWLRA will come to the table and negotiate collective increases.
“We’re going out of our way to communicate with them,” she says, pointing to the fact that the association changed the meeting date to accommodate the company. The landlord’s refusal to come today “feels a bit like a cop-out,” she adds.
Cynthia Black and her dog, Lupen. (Kat Eschner(
Over the course of the barbecue, one thing becomes clear: nobody interviewed by TVO Today says they feel secure in their homes. Lorenzo Beneduzi says he just started paying almost $300 more per month for his Livmore unit, an 11.4 per cent increase. Beneduzi, a structural engineer who has lived in the unit for about three years, says it’s a burden: “At the end of it, it’s not only the rent that increases. It’s everything else — food and gas and all that … Basically all the wage increase that I get goes to rent.” He isn’t able to save much for a down payment, his long-term plan.
Constantine Rhaich’al, who works in sales, rents a two-bedroom Livmore unit for himself and his two children — Josh, 10, and Olivia, 4. He’s says that he’s currently on an 18-month lease, paying about $2,900 per month, and that he expects his next notice of rent increase around December: “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Rhaich’al has some land about half an hour outside Owen Sound, but he wants his family to stay in the city for his daughter’s sake. “There's benefits to services, the whole idea of walkability, her having access to people, meeting new people, having friends — it's important,” he says. “I think it's something everyone should have access to. But with rent and housing the way it is, it's not going to happen.”
Alison Gains and Dalton Ingham, both game developers, rented their two-bedroom Livmore unit in 2020. They say they were paying about $2,500 before a rent increase of 11 per cent, which brought the rent up to nearly $2,800. They moved from a nearby one-bedroom unit in a different building in 2020, when they were both working from home. “For the first year, it was fine,” Gains says. Then the increase made things less comfortable. They’re dreading news of the next one, which should be coming soon.
The pair’s last building was older and thus subject to rent control. They didn’t know about the 2018 loophole. “I feel like an idiot,” Ingham says. “We tell all our friends now.”
Lorenzo Beneduzi is a structural engineer who says he has lived in his unit for about three years. (Kat Eschner)
York University communications professor Rob Gehl moved from the United states with his partner, Jesse Houf, and their teenaged son in January. The pair was aware of the 2018 loophole, but hearing about the rent increases got them looking for a change. They say they’re currently paying $4,600 for a two-bedroom unit with a den. The building they’re moving to is also not rent controlled. “Hopefully, they don’t do the same thing,” Gehl says.
Over the course of the evening, organizers estimate, well over 100 people — including many children and accompanied by a number of dogs — stop by. They scatter around the large patio that is a common space for both the Livmore High Park tenants and those who live in the nearby Grenadier Square buildings, which are subject to rent control because they were first occupied before November 15, 2018.
“It’s the weather,” Sandra Agbanti says. The pediatric nurse, who works at St. Joseph’s hospital, lives in one of the rent-controlled buildings with her husband, Jason Chartrand, a PhD candidate at York University, and their young twins. They’re paying $2,060 for a two-bedroom, she says, a price that seemed very expensive when they moved in four years ago. These days, it doesn’t seem so bad compared to other rents in the neighbourhood, but their life situation has changed.
“When we first came in, we were both students,” Agbanti says. “We had a roommate, and we tried to kind of make the best. Now I’ve moved on to my career — I’m an RN — and we have twins, so it’s all the more important for us to be able to afford where we live.” S expects they’ll eventually leave the city due to rising prices on everything from food to daycare.
Sandra Agbanti (second from right) and Jason Chartrand with MPP Bhutila Karpoche (second from left). (Kat Eschner)
Three hundred and forty people are currently subscribed to the Livmore Tenants Association mailing list. “We’ve also got signatures on our collective letter from over 60 per cent of units,” Scott tells TVO Today via text message, “which represents approximately 550 people.”
The tenants’ association also contacted Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Steve Clark. In a written response to its collective letter, the minister said he was “sorry to hear about” the situation and went on to provide boilerplate information about the Residential Tenancies Act.
As of press time on Friday, the association had received no further communications from GWLRA. No meeting has been scheduled.
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