Cole Webber

Evicted and erased: How Montreal’s predatory landlords are turning poverty into profit A Mexican immigrant now living in a tent is just one casualty of a growing eviction-for-profit scheme. A new investigation reveals how landlords exploit vulnerable tenants, weaponize housing laws, and...

How Montreal’s predatory landlords are turning poverty into profit

A new investigation by @zacharykamel.bsky.social reveals how landlords exploit vulnerable tenants, weaponize housing laws, and leave homes empty—all in the name of return on investment

ricochet.media/justice/hous...

#housingcrisis

Tenants facing mass eviction say negotiations broke down over clause meant to ‘silence’ them Landlord Starlight Investments says it "has never sought to prevent residents from raising concerns."

“After tenants agreed to the landlord’s offer in principle, the landlord added the ‘non-disparagement’ clause, Sameer Beyan said.”
www.thestar.com/news/gta/ten...

There are now almost as many homeless people whose main source of income is from work (15%) as there are on ODSP (16%)

Homelessness in Toronto has doubled since 2021 and the number of working homeless is up four percent in the same period, according to the city's new survey numbers. Part-time work is now the third most frequently reported source of income among homeless people after OW and ODSP

Follow the liquidity: Monetary policy, spatial inequality and the Bank of Canada's emergency COVID-19 corporate debt programs In a financial crisis, maintaining liquidity in the economy is a central concern of monetary policymakers seeking to stave off frozen financial market…

New: 'Follow the liquidity: Monetary policy, spatial inequality and the Bank of Canada's emergency COVID-19 corporate debt programs.'

We trace the BoC's corporate debt purchases spatially uneven effects and its bolstering of a financialized status quo.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Some Toronto students offered Free Palestine and Free Tibet as yearbook quotes. The school removed quotes from the entire Grade 12 Parkdale Collegiate administration said the decision was made to align with a provincial directive to avoid political biases in the classroom.

Another Toronto high school is being accused of suppressing student voices after all Grade 12 quotes were removed from its yearbook over student submissions related to Palestine and Tibet.

York University president announces resignation Rhonda Lenton is ending her second 5-year term early — after a tenure marked by the university’s launch of a new Markham campus, but also faculty strikes and program cuts

Scoop: York University's president Rhonda Lenton has announced she will depart from the top job 18-months early. Her term has been marked by institutional expansion, but also by protest, a significant faculty strike in 2018, and recent program cuts --> www.torontotoday.ca/local/educat...

In Issue 7.1 #LongRead "Exploring the spatial composition of UK social housing", Nick Clare, Joe Kearsey & Shaun French discuss the challenges of organising in, against-and-beyond social housing, through insights from successful & unsuccessful campaigns.

radicalhousingjournal.org/2025/explori...

Courageous youth speaking truth. It is exceedingly difficult as a high school student to challenge authority, as your day is literally structured around taking orders from petty tyrants.

lmao

Fire and Ice • Ill Will Lessons from the Battle of Los Angeles

Building on the model of "First We Take Columbia," a new short article offering 22 practical theses on the anti-ICE struggle in California and beyond.
illwill.com/fire-and-ice

Nick Bernards 2024: Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism. London: Pluto Press. - IJURR In Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism, Nick Bernards offers a useful Marxist critique of financialization discourse grounded in his ...

A nice review of Fictions of Financialization in @ijurresearch.bsky.social :

www.ijurr.org/book_review/...

Nick Bernards 2024: Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism. London: Pluto Press. - IJURR In Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism, Nick Bernards offers a useful Marxist critique of financialization discourse grounded in his ...

My review of Fictions of Financialization by Nick Bernards.
www.ijurr.org/book_review/...

The Los Angeles Protests Are an Act of Self-Defense Residents of L.A. aren’t merely protesting ICE; they’re attempting to protect their communities from ICE’s raids.

"What we are witnessing in Los Angeles is not only a protest; it is self-defense." Fuck yeah, @melissagiragrant.com. Read and share this. newrepublic.com/article/1963...

I wrote about Toronto’s bubble zone bylaw for @canadiandimension.bsky.social
TL;DR: it’s bad, but probably not (just) for the reasons you think it is

Tires are Nova Scotia's biggest U.S. export, and this town runs on them | CBC News As Premier Tim Houston travels to France to meet with Michelin, a look inside Nova Scotia's largest private-sector employer.

"In 1979...government passed an amendment to the Trade Union Act, which became known as the Michelin Bill. The bill decreed that in order to unionize, any company with multiple locations in Nova Scotia must sign up a majority of employees across all locations"
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

‘Financial landlords’ more aggressive on raising Toronto rents than other landlords, study finds Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), asset managers and private equity firms raised rents farther above Toronto’s average rents than chains and individual landlords, the University of Waterloo study...

“Financial landlords” in Toronto are the most aggressive type of landlord when it comes to raising rent prices, a new study at the University of Waterloo has found.

God love Holmberg

Jason Kenney on the CBC panel is sinister

Multiple Lankin Investments building tenants protest above guideline rent increase Residents of multiple buildings owned by Lankin Investments gathered at the company's headquarters to protest a rent increase of more than double the provincial cap.

“I think the profit goes to the investors … that’s where the extra money that they want to charge goes to, not to the maintenance of the building or for the tenants at all,” says Mohan.

Got that one out of the way

anti-eviction struggles are an affront to the YIMBY project

Thorncliffe rent strikers facing eviction protest Downsview lands developer Dozens of Thorncliffe Park rent strikers are facing eviction over their failure to pay rent. They say they want their landlord to end its use of above guideline rent increases.

A struggle in one working-class district in Toronto has done more to illuminate the housing question in this city than all the recent punditry, spilled ink, and activist conferences on the topic combined
www.torontotoday.ca/local/real-e...

Thorncliffe rent strikers facing eviction protest Downsview lands developer Dozens of Thorncliffe Park rent strikers are facing eviction over their failure to pay rent. They say they want their landlord to end its use of above guideline rent increases.

#New: Dozens of rent strikers in Thorncliffe Park are facing eviction over withholding rent. They want their landlord, Starlight, to drop its above guideline rent increases. They also say the developer of the new Downsview Airport lands is implicated. Why? www.torontotoday.ca/local/real-e...

The "wartime approach" argument is unconvincing because it leaves out how exceptional policies were based on massive industrial and urban expansion and rising incomes during the war and were responding to a historic strike wave, conditions unlike those that confront us today

Household Production and the Essence of Separation that Appears in Commodities | Kirstin Munro | cpcsymposium I will build on the work of Paddy Quick and Roswitha Scholz to make the case that it is only the partial rather than complete separation of working-class people from the means of subsistence that nece...

Event coming up April 22 at 11am eastern time, I am presenting new work “Household Production and the Essence of Separation that Appears in Commodities” at the virtual symposium Critical Perspectives on care: SRT in a Global Context

www.cpcsymposium.com/event-detail...

The "financialization" story is incomplete without consideration of how the class struggle over housing determines the practices of these (Canadian-based) landlords

Parkdale tenants at 103 & 105 West Lodge defended neighbours from pandemic evictions and forced Hazelview to stop hoarding vacant units. Tenants at Starlight-owned buildings at 71, 75, and 79 Thorncliffe Park Dr. are now on rent strike against AGIs

Today, I attended an open meeting in a proletarian district of the city where organizers argued against electoralism and reliance on politicians and other intermediaries in their struggles. The contrast with the condescension and demoralization that pervades the Left was striking