Evictions Without Answers

The loss may begin with an income shock, a notice taped to a door, a hearing, a repayment agreement that collapses, or the quiet decision to leave before the formal process is complete. On paper, that departure may never appear as an eviction. In a household’s memory, it can feel exactly like one.

That distinction sits at the centre of Toronto’s growing eviction-data controversy. Toronto Community Housing Corporation reports one set of numbers. Figures derived from Tribunals Ontario records and analyzed by housing advocates suggest another. Both may be accurate within their own definitions. Together, they reveal a deeper problem: the city still does not have a complete public account of who is being displaced, how often, or what happens afterward.

TCHC’s published figures count completed evictions, households physically removed or those that vacated under a notice or order. By that measure, the corporation recorded 162 evictions in 2023, 237 in 2024 and 391 between January and October 2025. Arrears accounted for 258 of the 2025 cases, while 133 were classified as non-arrears. TCHC says its eviction rate remains below one per cent of its housing portfolio.

Photographer: Dina Badamshina

The tribunal figures measure something broader. Using information obtained through a freedom-of-information request, advocates calculated eviction outcomes by subtracting withdrawals and mediation, or alternative-dispute-resolution cases from applications. Their figures show approximately: 624 outcomes in 2023, 610 in 2024, and 541 in the first ten months of 2025.

The difference is not a minor statistical disagreement. In 2023, the gap between the two datasets was 462 cases. In 2024, it was roughly 373. By 2025, the difference had narrowed but remained substantial.

The numbers do not necessarily prove that TCHC is hiding physical removals. They do show that Toronto is using competing measurements to describe the same housing crisis.

TCHC files more applications than it ultimately enforces, the corporation has explained. Some tenants enter repayment agreements. Some cases are withdrawn. Some are mediated. Some orders may be voided when arrears are paid. Others may end with tenants leaving voluntarily before enforcement, but voluntary is a complicated word when the alternative is losing a home.

For a tenant facing a hearing, medical crisis, reduced income or a rules-based notice, leaving before the sheriff arrives may be the least damaging option available. A database may record no completed eviction. The tenant may record displacement, disruption and fear. That is why definitions matter. They determine what the public sees, and what they do not see

Let us take a look at the case of Reem Saad and her mother, who faced a non-arrears, rules-based eviction from a Pleasant View Toronto Community Housing unit amid serious medical concerns. Their experience illustrates the distance between administrative language and lived reality. A formal record can describe a process. It cannot, by itself, capture the panic of finding another home, the cost of moving, the loss of neighbourhood ties, or the physical strain placed on an already vulnerable family.

The people most affected are seniors, people with disabilities, families living on fixed incomes and residents whose stability can be shaken by a single emergency. They also include communities already confronting racialized housing insecurity.

African Caribbean tenants represent approximately 40 to 42 per cent of TCHC’s tenant population. Broader housing research presented by the city indicates that African Caribbean respondents were nearly twice as likely to report a lifetime eviction experience, while neighbourhoods with higher shares of African Caribbean renters had nearly twice the eviction-filing rate even after poverty controls. Yet TCHC does not currently publish eviction data disaggregated by race.

That absence prevents a definitive public answer to a central question: are African Caribbean tenants being disproportionately affected within Toronto’s social-housing system?

The question cannot be answered by assumption. It requires evidence. Without race-based data, the city cannot properly measure disproportionality, identify patterns or design targeted remedies. Nor can residents easily test official assurances that the system is working equitably.

Photographer: Baruk Granda

The gap is especially striking because the city already collects demographic information in some prevention programs. In 2025, the Eviction Prevention in the Community program reported preventing 1,105 household evictions. African Caribbean-led households represented 465 of those cases (42%) and Indigenous households accounted for 44 cases. The Rent Bank reported 2,961 approved grants, including 441 to African Caribbean-led households.

Those figures suggest both need and reach. They also raise an uncomfortable question: what does prevented mean over time?

A case may be closed successfully because a tenant remains housed at that moment. If the household later loses the unit, enters shelter, or moves into unsafe or unaffordable housing, the public record may never connect those events. The source material notes that longer-term stability and later displacement are not systematically published in the reviewed metrics.

Prevention is essential, but prevention cannot be fully evaluated if the city measures the immediate outcome and loses sight of the household afterward.

This is the larger story beneath Toronto’s eviction figures. It is about the politics of counting. What qualifies as an eviction? Does an order count if it is later voided?

What about someone who moves in with relatives, enters a shelter or leaves the city? The records do not answer all of these questions. That is precisely why the unanswered questions matter.

Photographer: HiveBoxx

TCHC’s Data for Equity Framework is expected to support future reporting, with Q4 2026 reporting requested on demographic characteristics such as: race, age, gender and postal code. Advocates and community groups, including the Regent Park Neighbourhood Association, have called for stronger transparency, a moratorium and race-disaggregated data.

A more complete system would connect applications, orders, mediation, enforcement, departures and post-eviction housing outcomes. It would distinguish between a case resolved through genuine stability and one merely pushed out of public view.

Toronto needs a more honest picture of displacement. The city’s social-housing system is supposed to provide security for people who cannot reliably find it in the private market. If the public record cannot show when that security breaks down, then the problem is the system may be losing sight of them.

When people disappear between categories; between an application and an order, between a departure and a removal, between prevention and long-term stability, the absence of data becomes part of the story.