West End Phoenix: “It should not be this hard”

Private equity firms are targeting low-income apartment buildings across the city as the ultimate investment: buying them out, evicting tenants and renovating the empty units. The new rents, subject to increases without controls, are so high that they’re sending some residents to the food bank

Michael Cuadra has lived with his parents in the same Weston apartment building since he was eight years old. For much of that time, it was a good place to live. There was a community room on the ground floor where tenants could gather with their neighbours, or host friends and family. A security guard kept an eye on the building. And he has fond memories of the building’s friendly owners who greeted Cuadra when he was a kid, and even unlocked the door for him, whenever he forgot his key during middle and high school.

But sometime in the past few years, all that changed. Starlight, a private Canadian real-estate investment firm, bought the 20-storey building near Keele and Lawrence around the start of the pandemic. Soon, the community room was closed off and converted into another unit. The laundry room, too, was shrunk into a fraction of its former size to free up space for yet another unit. The security guard and old owners are gone, too. Now, the office is staffed by workers who turn over so frequently, says Cuadra, who is now 31, there’s no time to learn their names.

Like many Toronto rental properties, his building was purchased by a financialized landlord, which has ushered in profound changes not only to the building but to the Cuadra family’s finances. Financialized landlords treat housing as an investment commodity. In a matter of decades, companies like Starlight have picked up hundreds of thousands of rental units across Canada. In Toronto, they disproportionately buy buildings in low-income neighbourhoods like Cuadra’s, and in neighbourhoods with a majority Black population.

For tenants, this has a profound impact on their lives.

Cuadra and his parents are struggling to pay the bills after receiving an above-guideline rent increase (AGI) in 2022. In Ontario, landlords of buildings constructed before November 2018 are limited in how much they can raise rents. In 2025, the limit is 2.5 per cent. But landlords can apply for an AGI from the Landlord and Tenant Board, which allows them to raise the rent as much as 9 per cent over three years. AGIs are granted in many circumstances, including after a landlord has finished upgrades to their building, according to the Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations. For some tenants, that means they are essentially subsidizing their own future displacement.

Cuadra and his neighbours fought the increase at the LTB and are still awaiting its decision, three years later. In the meantime, he and his family cancelled their cable, streaming subscriptions and the landline, which allowed them to buzz guests into the building. To cut costs, Cuadra says, he “semi-depends” on the food bank run by the same non-profit he sometimes works for, “just so we can have some breathing room.”

Many tenants don’t know that they live in a building owned by a financialized firm. In fact, these companies seem to follow a playbook to obscure the ownership of their buildings. Each building is branded separately with its own website; the owner’s name typically doesn’t appear on it. Property management firms, which handle the work of finding tenants and managing repairs, are normally the public-facing entities. In fact, Cuadra didn’t realize who had bought the building until Starlight, which is Canada’s largest corporate landlord, sent out AGI notices in 2022.

That said, the name “Starlight Blackstar” appears on court documents related to evictions at the building as early as 2020. In 2018, Starlight partnered with Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm, to purchase five apartment buildings in Toronto, though they did not make the addresses public.

A new website for Cuadra’s building at 1465 Lawrence Ave., appeared in 2023, according to a webpage archive. The site advertises “fully renovated suites with open-concept modern kitchens” that have “chrome accents” and “breakfast bars.” A renovated three-bedroom goes for $3,245, approximately double what Cuadra and his parents pay for their three-bedroom unit.

About a year ago, the building was listed for sale again.

A posting on the LinkedIn page of Colliers real estate agent Dayma Itamunoula shows that 1465 Lawrence was listed a year ago as a package deal with another rental building in Mississauga. More than $8 million had been poured into renovations at 1465 Lawrence in five years, the listing said, and 25 per cent of the 164 units were newly renovated.

“This is as good as it gets,” Itamunoula wrote to potential buyers.

Itamunoula’s 2024 year-end newsletter stated that the Starlight Blackstar portfolio had been sold to Equiton, another privately held investment firm, for $130 million.

Starlight told West End Phoenix in a statement that it no longer owns 1465 Lawrence but wouldn’t confirm details of the sale. “While we understand there are questions regarding the specific property previously under our ownership, we are unable to provide further comment on a residence that is no longer in our portfolio,” its senior vice-president Penny Colomvakos said.

A spokesperson for Blackstone also provided a written statement: “We believe excellence in residential operations enhances resident satisfaction and supports strong communities,” it said, in a passage that reflects the timbre of the message – but would not answer specific questions.

Cuadra says he didn’t know the building had been sold again, but in retrospect, there were signs. Namely, while common areas and empty units have undergone renovations, existing tenants have struggled to get even basic repairs done in their homes.

Black mould in their bathroom took a month to be removed, Cuadra says, which was a health hazard for himself as an asthmatic and for his father, who is in his 70s and has lung problems. Cuadra used plastic bags to cover up a hole about two metres wide in the wall between his bedroom and the bathroom, which had been there for months, to try to keep the mould out.

The elevators in the building also go down “once or twice a month in a good month,” Cuadra says. He and his parents have had to walk up 19 flights of stairs to their unit or wait in the car for hours with their groceries until elevator service resumes.

As a co-organizer for Toronto ACORN, a local chapter of a national grassroots tenants’ rights group, Cuadra has spoken to CBC News about the AGIs and participated in a demonstration at the building.

“It was only then that they cared for a while to try to fix some of the things that we were complaining about,” he says. “But we can’t just bring the media out on a dime every single time the door isn’t properly sealing.”

The family is also worried about what will happen if they receive another AGI. If the rent goes up any higher than the approximately $1,600 he and his parents pay now, Cuadra says, they will become even more dependent on the food bank. His father works as a machinist and his mother works at a funeral home. Cuadra is on social assistance and works for a non-profit seasonally.

“We’re already kind of struggling,” Cuadra says. “I try not to depend on the food bank that I work at because it’s meant for other people. But I’m also fighting myself more and more, going, ‘With the cost of everything going up … we’re starting to be the very same needy people that need food banks.’”

As a low-income neighbourhood, Cuadra’s district of York South– Weston is one of the areas most targeted by landlords like Starlight. According to 2021 census data, the most recent available, the neighbourhood’s median household income was $65,000 after taxes. More than half of the area’s residents are immigrants. The Cuadra family is Latino and many of their neighbours speak Spanish. These characteristics are typical of the neighbourhoods most likely to be targeted by financialized landlords.

In 2023, Nemoy Lewis presented to Parliament the findings of a study of transactions for 223,000 Toronto rental units over a 27-year period. Lewis, an assistant professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, found that while majority Black neighbourhoods make up only 1.1 per cent of the neighbourhoods in Toronto, 6.85 per cent of transactions involving financialized landlords happened in these neighbourhoods.

“We also found that income appears to be influencing the acquisition patterns of landlords in the multi-family rental market, especially at the bottom end of the household income spectrum, where the median household income is below $76,500,” he said in his presentation. “Financialized landlords accounted for 66.37 per cent of all those units in those particular dissemination areas in the city of Toronto.”

According to Lewis, Starlight purchased a building on Kipling Avenue – records show it was 2737 and 2757 Kipling – in late 2018. By 2019, the company had filed almost 500 evictions. Then Starlight raised the rent on the vacant units by 25.6 per cent.

But while lower-income neighbourhoods in the northwest quadrant of the city, where Cuadra and his family live, as well as the downtown east and Parkdale, are most affected, this issue is also taking a toll in higher-income pockets of the West End.

Cynthia Black left her unit at 50 High Park Ave., which didn’t have rent control, in 2024 after her $1,846 rent was raised by seven per cent. She moved in with her partner – whom she met through tenant organizing efforts – in a neighbouring building owned by the same company, GWL Realty Advisors. (The company is a subsidiary of Great West Life, which is in turn controlled by the multibillion-dollar Power Corporation of Canada.)

Now, Black shares a two-bedroom apartment with her partner and his six-year-old son. Both adults work from home, so one of them works in their bedroom while the other works in the living room.

“It is very crowded,” she says. “We are constantly worried about what we are going to do going forward. As he gets older, he’s going to need space from us, and there’s just no other option for where to go,” she says of her partner’s son.

Living in an investment commodity with ever-increasing rent is changing what she imagines for her life. In fact, her plans to have a child and save up for a house “went out the window,” she says. And she only anticipates the financial burden getting more difficult to bear.

The day before she spoke to West End Phoenix, the family received notice of another rent increase. This year, their rent is being hiked 14 per cent to nearly $3,000 a month. (Her building, constructed post-November 2018, isn’t subject to rent control.)

“How do I feel about it? It’s unfair. It feels like we’re being taken advantage of,” she says. “It should not be this hard.”

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Article by Emma Paling for West End Phoenix