Renoviction and Resistance in the Capitalist City by Cole Webber and Philip Zigman (Between the Lines, 2026).
Consider the plight of the landlord.
He wakes up every night in a panic, thinking about his underperforming asset (your home) and wonders how different life could be like if he could increase his capitalization rate (raise your rent). He despairs at the thought of not being able to pursue his life-long dream (of renovating with greige floors and fake quartz countertops) and rages at all the red tape that stands in his way (legislation that provides tenants with the bare minimum of a legal process).
After days spent working tireless to create operational efficiencies (printing off letters to harass decades-long tenants who still prefer to pay by cheque), he wanders the property in search of new ideas (increasing how much you have to pay to do your laundry) and opportunities for adding value (installing a new boiler that will allow him to collect a government debate and apply for an above guideline rent increase).
In his darkest moments, his friends and family encourage him to walk an easier path – to find work that will confer greater benefit on society, such as owning a temp agency, selling tobacco to minors, or working in HR.
But the spirit of the landlord cannot be broken. He will do what was born to do: he will renovate.
… but it’s not about renovations
In Renoviction and the Capitalist City, Cole Webber and Phillip Zigman make a clear and persuasive case that renovictions are not about renovations at all. Despite sympathetic stories that appear in mainstream media about a powerless landlord who just wants to upgrade a tenant’s unit and an unreasonable tenant who just won’t leave, Webber and Zigman demonstrate that this narrative is a smokescreen concealing the fact that renovations are only a means to an end.
The real purpose of renovating a tenant’s unit is to displace that tenant in order to raise the rent on a now-vacant unit. “Tenants are not pushed out as a by-product of renovation work,” argue Webber and Zigman. “Rather, renovictions are conducted so that rents can be raised to market rates, which is only possible if tenants are permanently displaced.”
In Ontario, most residential buildings are subject to an annual cap on how much a landlord can raise the rent. However, like many other jurisdictions, this cap does not apply if a tenant leaves the unit and a new lease is signed. As a result, a gap grows over time between the rent that the existing tenant pays to the landlord and the rent that a landlord could be charging. The drive to eliminate this gap and realize these potential profits is called ‘closing the rent gap’, and Webber and Zigman reveal how essential this process is in understanding the landlord playbook.
Tenants can’t rely on the legal system
One of the great strengths of this book is the way that Webber and Zigman take apart the dichotomy between “legal” and “illegal” renovictions (or what is sometimes described as “good faith” vs “bad faith” evictions).
They explain how many of the existing definitions of “renoviction” contain within it the assumption that the eviction only counts as a renoviction if the landlord uses the wrong form, or doesn’t follow the precise guidelines set forth in legislation or by the Landlord and Tenant Board. In other words, for many in the non-profit advocacy world, a renoviction is seen as bad not because it results in displacement, but because it may not be following all the legal steps.
But as Webber and Zigman reveal in Chapter 2 (“The Landlord Playbook”), many of the tactics that landlords use are entirely legal. When a building is sold and a new owner is surveying his new tenants, he may approach them informally about needing to leave, he may provide them with buyout packages (“cash for keys” deals), and he may start to knock on doors and drop off letters informing them of his plan to file formal eviction notices.
“Landlords know that lower-income tenants are particularly susceptible to buyout pressure because they are more likely to have urgent, immediate expenses and debts,” they argue. “By applying buyout pressure on tenants, landlords use the social power of money to discipline and displace uncooperative, low-income tenants.”
If we remember that renovictions are about displacing tenants in order to profit from closing rent gaps, then we can recognize that landlords will employ a diversity of tactics in getting their desired outcome. Landlords may provide you with formal notice and take you to the Landlord and Tenant Board, or they may simply start renovations in neighbouring units to make your life unbearable until you cannot take it any longer.
The key issue is not whether the renoviction is legal or illegal – the problem is with the power that landlords have to displace you and the profits they gain in doing so. And that is why another important argument that runs through the book is that tenants cannot rely on a legal strategy to defend their homes. Legal challenges can be used strategically, but they argue throughout for a “non-reliance” on legal strategy alone.
The question of reforms
Webber and Zigman address possible reforms in Chapter 4 (“Renoviction and the State”). Of all the chapters, I was surprised to find this one to be the weakest. I’ll highlight two points of disagreement that would likely stand out to other readers with a background in the tenant movement.
Webber and Zigman are dismissive of local efforts to regulate the legal renoviction process with municipal by-laws. In the last two years, city governments have been pushed by local tenant organizations to introduce by-laws to deal with the increased rate of renoviction. Hamilton, Toronto, Mississauga, and a few other cities have introduced by-laws that require landlords to apply for a renovation license and co-operate with various requirements, one of the main ones being proper compensation for tenants.
These by-laws don’t override the Residential Tenancies Act (because they can’t), but they do add new administrative hurdles. In Webber and Zigmans’ view, however, this has made the situation worse for tenants. They view these municipal by-laws as “increas[ing] the pressure on tenants to submit to eviction if their landlord produces paperwork that the state deems acceptable.”
However, the actual evidence so far points in the opposite direction. In Hamilton, within the first year of its renoviction by-law, the City reported a dramatic decrease in N13 notices in the LTB data. Tenant organizers in the city have also observed less renoviction cases overall. The evidence so far would indicate that these reform efforts are having a strong deterrent effect and have been slowing down the rate of tenant displacement. One can welcome these minor reforms without abandoning the broader perspective on renovictions that the book advances.
The other argument that was less than convincing was the characterization of local initiatives to support tenant rights (such as municipal partnerships with tenant advocacy groups or legal clinics) as efforts to “reimpose the rent relation on the working class, even as it enshrines new rights and regulations for tenants and landlords.” This analysis is far too abstract to be useful and wouldn’t seem reasonable in any other comparable context. Would we say that reforms to the Employment Standards Act, or improved language in a Collective Bargaining agreement, “reimpose the wage relation”? Some fringe and unthinking elements on the left may say so, but it strikes me as divorced from the live questions facing the tenant movement and not up to the caliber of argument displayed in the rest of the book.
The power of organizing
However, Renoviction and Resistance in the Capitalist City is not a book that considers renovictions in the abstract. Each chapter demonstrates a strong connection to real tenants, real landlords, and recent case studies that demonstrate the importance of organizing with your neighbours.
“When tenants organize and take collective action,” Webber and Zigman argue, “they have beat renoviction altogether and kept their homes.”
Webber and Zigman do tenants and tenant organizers a great service by showing us that organizing isn’t just a good idea, it’s the only effective tool against the landlord playbook. They explore real victories that have occurred as a result of tenants asserting their collective power, and show us that there are simple, repeatable steps that all tenants can take.
Landlords will not stop in their pursuit of greater profits. In the current period, that pursuit has led them to close rent gaps through a strategy of renoviction, and that strategy will continue to evolve and mutate in response to political and legal challenges. But regardless of what that pursuit will lead to next, tenants organizing with their neighbours will continue to be “the antidote to the despair tenants often feel when landlords threaten to kick them out of their homes,” and this book is a valuable new resource for all those tenants seeking to do just that.
But landlords don’t deserve their profits. The system that enables and protects the power of landlords, and has made our homes into investment toys for the rich, needs to be dismantled in its entirety. The example of district organizing discussed in the book points toward the need for ever greater linkages between working class people in order to realize our power, and strengthening ties with the organized labour movement remains essential. It will take an energized and coordinated working class movement to win the real transformations that we need in our housing system, such as a massive build-out of public non-market housing, the flowering of tenant co-operatives, and a radical overhaul of the RTA to close all the loopholes and exemptions that incentivize displacement. If housing is truly a human right, then we can’t settle for anything less.
Author
Did you like this article? Help us produce more like it by donating $1, $2, or $5. Donate
