Every tenant in Toronto knows that rents are out of control. While our wages, pensions and support payments stay the same, landlords are taking a bigger and bigger chunk of our income to feed record-breaking profits. Tenants know that if we lose our home, or want to move, the cost of a new apartment could drive us out of our neighbourhoods and possibly our city. Even if we live in a rent-controlled unit, we know that landlords will neglect repairs, claim to move their children into units, or lie about renovations, so that they can push us out and raise the rent.

It doesn't have to be like this. Join us in a conversation about Vacancy Rent Control, a solution to many of these problems. We will be joined by housing justice organizers from BC and Ontario, and we will learn more about Ontario's history of weakening rent control, the effects it has had on tenants, and what Vacancy Rent Control looks like in reality. We hope to build understanding and consciousness among tenants, tenant associations, and housing justice advocates, to better understand this critical demand.

Speakers include:

• Brendan Jowett, Staff Housing Lawyer, Neighbourhood Legal Services (Moderator)

• Dani Aiello is a CMHC-SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen's University, and a researcher with The Right to Remain project. Her interests include housing inequality, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, community-based research and critical GIS.

• Tom deGrey is a tenant researcher with The Right To Remain project, and is the President of the Board of the Downtown Eastside SRO Collaborative. His interests include SRO housing, histories of the Downtown Eastside, and Haiku.

• Ryan Hardy is a staff lawyer at ACTO, the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario. He has practiced landlord/tenant law at several legal clinics in Toronto and worked as tenant duty counsel in Toronto and Peel Region.

• Alan Walks, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Geography University of Toronto, Mississauga, is a professor of urban geography and planning at the University of Toronto. He has published a range of research related to housing issues (gentrification, mortgage lending and the financialization of housing, affordability and homelessness, gated communities), as well as other topics (neighbourhood inequality, segregation and ghettoization, automobility and the city, etc), and is the co-editor of four scholarly books (The Urban Political Economy and Ecology of Automobility: Driving Cities, Driving Inequality, Driving Politics; The Political Ecology of the Metropolis; Changing Neighbourhoods: Social and Spatial Polarization in Canadian Cities; and Critical Dialogues of Urban Governance, Development and Activism: London & Toronto). Among other things, he currently co-leads the Affordable Housing Challenge project at the University of Toronto School of Cities.
  

Please register and you will be sent a Zoom link the day before the event.