In Toronto, tenants took a stand against skyrocketing rents and neglected property maintenance. They organized committees. They confronted real estate corporations. And they won. Their struggle demonstrates the creative ways communities can mobilize communities against the power of capital.

“We’ll keep this going for as long as it takes until the company meets our demands,” said Beverly Henry to CBC, the public broadcaster. On June 1, 2023, Beverly and over five hundred tenants of a building in the York South-Weston suburb of Toronto, Canada, launched a full rent strike in protest against the excessive rent increases imposed by the building’s owner, Dream Unlimited. A month later, another hundred tenants from a nearby building joined the strike against the same company. On October 1, two more buildings, with around two hundred tenants, had started their own strike against another company, Barney River. After nearly sixteen months of sustained effort, the strike finally reached a successful conclusion. At midnight on a Saturday, the property owner sent a statement with the conditions to begin negotiations and seek a resolution. In an unprecedented and unexpected turn, hundreds of tenants entered negotiations face-to-face with a multinational corporation. Their strength, they emphasized, lay in their unity and sheer numbers. Just over a year after launching the neighbors' strike, it has achieved significant victories, including lower rents, compensation for years of neglected repairs, and official recognition of the tenants' union as a legitimate collective voice. And most importantly: no one lost their home.

How did we get to this point?

One might ask, are we in a neighborhood with a strong history of tenant struggles? Not at all. Most of the people who joined the rent strike had no prior experience with social movements or political activism. York South-Weston is a suburb of Toronto where major political movements in the city don’t usually take root. Suburbs were developed to depoliticize and isolate people. But the tenants' organization, made up mostly of nurses, eldercare workers, hotel staff, and industrial workers, is moving away from market-driven organizing and building a movement rooted in the tenant class.

The York South-Weston Tenant Union (YSW Tenant Union) started five years ago with much more modest goals than leading rent strikes. We wanted to bring together the voices of tenants in the neighborhood and build political power against the displacement of the working class and the corporate takeover of all living spaces. But we quickly realized the fight against these corporations would be more complex than initially thought. These corporations are part of what we call the Landlord Industrial Complex. They control real estate developments and influence housing policy, or the absence of it, are among the largest campaign donors, and openly take an anti-union stance against any collective tenant organization. Faced with this multi-headed monster, we strengthened our grassroots organizing. We do this through a territorial base—our buildings. Most tenants in the neighborhood live in high-rise buildings, typically between fifteen and thirty stories, all managed by a single company. The union is structured around associations or committees in each building, responsible for keeping the organization active and coordinating joint struggles with other buildings.

Currently, we have around fifteen organized buildings, with roughly 2,000 active tenants in the neighborhood. Local committee organizing is essential because we don’t have paid staff who can dedicate themselves fully to the union’s work. This means our foundation relies heavily on direct engagement within each building. Over the years, these struggles have grown in both size and political significance. In the beginning, the main demands were about the lack of maintenance in the apartments, but now they encompass a broader range of issues.

How do you organize and sustain a tenant’s strike?

Starting a rent strike isn’t easy, nor can it happen overnight. In our union, we had spent years studying the best strategies to confront these companies, especially when they ignored or failed to honor agreements we had secured. In the case of the building at 33 King St., which has over 400 apartments, the majority of tenants reached their breaking point in the winter of 2023 when the property owner, Dream Unlimited, refused to uphold the agreement signed six months earlier and refund the money from the unlawful rent hikes. Despite the agreement's validation by the province’s Landlord and Tenant Board, the company held that it was not legally bound to comply. After years of mobilizing in front of the company’s offices, the CEO’s home, and other Dream properties across the city, it became clear that the only way to force the company to honor the agreement and negotiate the union’s other demands was to launch a full-scale rent strike with the widest possible tenant participation in the building.

That’s how, between March and June 2023, a large group of organized tenants in the building embarked on the task of convincing at least 200 apartments to join the strike. This number represented more than half of the building’s units, making support for the strike undeniable. Reaching that threshold required knocking on doors weekly, creating WhatsApp groups, showing up at bus stops early in the morning, and hosting social events—all to have face-to-face conversations with people who might be interested in joining the strike. After three months of preparation, they achieved their target number of apartments, and on June 1, 2023, the strike was officially declared in the building. From there, it grew and spread to other buildings within the union.

We’re often asked about the legality of rent strikes and the fear of eviction by the authorities. The reality is that strikes do constitute a breach of the contract between tenant and landlord. But that contract had already been torn to shreds by the landlords’ abuses—and that’s what tenants are responding to. The reason none of the hundreds of tenants participating in the strikes have been evicted essentially comes down to the sheer number of people involved.

Evicting them would mean displacing hundreds of tenants at once. And these tenants are organized, prepared, and ready to fight. So far, no judge has signed off on such an order. Beyond collective action, there’s also a legal strategy that reinforces the movement. This strategy primarily focuses on exposing landlords’ repeated violations of tenants’ rights, making it harder for them to take legal action against us.

We say, then, that the strike is sustained both by mass participation and activism. We can’t be naïve and expect the courts to resolve the issue. The pressure on property management companies is constant, and we make sure to take actions that disrupt their operations at least once a week.

What’s next for the movement?

The rent strikes in Toronto have shown that organized neighbors have no reason to fear the big corporations that control housing or to buy into the dominant narrative that being a tenant makes you any less—or that only homeownership brings happiness. Beyond securing better maintenance, rent compensation, and changes in how buildings are run, tenants have gained dignity and built a collective experience that gives them hope. The question arises: can these strikes be replicated elsewhere? We believe they can. They have succeeded despite being completely illegal and breaking with established norms of protest. They triumphed, above all, because hundreds of people came together and built a collective struggle at a time when such movements seem rare. Since the start of the strike—and especially after the victory—countless messages and calls have come in from tenants across the province and the country, asking for support in organizing their own strikes.

It’s clear that the tenant movement has the potential to become one of the most significant grassroots movements of our time. The challenge now is to build a solid foundation that allows us to respond to these calls, strengthen the organization, and expand the struggle—across the city, the province, and the country. We know it won’t be easy, but it feels like we’re on the right path.