A Multi-Scalar Framework for Understanding Evictions: Racialization, Resistance, and Housing Justice in Toronto, Canada

Abstract

Eviction is often framed in public discourse as the result of individual behaviour or economic hardship, particularly a tenant’s inability to pay rent (Desmond, 2016; Woodhall-Melnik et al., 2026). More recent scholarship, however, conceptualizes eviction as a structural outcome produced by housing markets, governance arrangements, and regulatory systems (Mah, 2021; Wachsmuth et al., 2023). This dissertation builds on these structural analyses while questioning a related blind spot: the limited attention paid to planning institutions and their role in shaping eviction dynamics. While this shift toward structural explanations has been important, it often leaves the processes that produce housing loss insufficiently examined. This dissertation examines eviction in Toronto as a coordinated system of governance shaped through tenancy law, municipal planning practice, redevelopment processes, and administrative routines. Evictions are formally carried out through provincial legal mechanisms. However, the institutional conditions that produce housing instability unfold across multiple sites, including planning approvals, enforcement pathways, municipal intake systems, and tribunal procedures. Eviction therefore emerges as a process structured through timing, coordination, and recognition, which determine whether housing instability is interrupted or allowed to intensify. Drawing on institutional ethnography, Critical Race Theory, and racial capitalism, this dissertation traces eviction across interconnected layers. The analysis integrates 24 tenant interviews, 9 interviews with tenant organizers, 6 interviews with urban planners, observations from 8 tenant organization meetings, and 110 observations of Landlord and Tenant Board virtual hearings. This empirical approach enables examination of eviction across systemic conditions, institutional encounters, and tenant experience. The dissertation is organized in seven chapters. Chapters 1 to 3 establish the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological foundation by framing eviction as layered governance, reviewing scholarship on eviction, planning, racialization, and resistance, and outlining the shared empirical design. Chapters 4 to 6 then present three connected manuscripts that examine eviction as administrative governance, situated resistance within institutional constraint, and cumulative harm produced through institutional time. Chapter 7 synthesizes the findings across the manuscripts and develops the dissertation’s contributions to planning, housing justice, and eviction governance. Together, the manuscript chapters move from system to encounter to lived aftermath, allowing the dissertation to trace eviction from its institutional organization, to the relational practices through which tenants and planners navigate it, to the temporal accumulation of harm that follows. The first manuscript examines the administrative organization of eviction. It demonstrates how redevelopment processes, legal notices, and coordination across tribunal, service, and property management systems produce displacement through routine bureaucratic practices. This analysis shows how eviction risk becomes predictable through standardized communication, fragmented accountability, and procedural sequencing. These processes shift interpretive and administrative work onto tenants. The second manuscript examines how tenants and tenant organizers respond to these constraints by building mutual aid infrastructures that stabilize housing. These practices include document preparation, accompaniment, interpretation, and shared navigation of notices, tribunal procedures, municipal referrals, and housing support systems. This manuscript also shows that planners participate in eviction governance through discretionary practices, including referrals, documentation, and file coordination. These actions influence whether tenant-reported instability is recognized and addressed. The third manuscript examines eviction as a temporal process. It shows how delays at the tribunal, slow or stalled administrative action, and the order of procedural steps prolong uncertainty and increase harm. These dynamics place pressure on racialized and immigrant tenants by shifting the burden of coordination, cost, and risk onto households over time. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that eviction is structured through identifiable mechanisms. These mechanisms include administrative timing, fragmented jurisdictional responsibility, and procedural rules that determine when tenant instability becomes actionable. This dissertation contributes to planning scholarship by showing how planning decisions shape eviction processes. Through redevelopment approvals, rental replacement policies, and negotiated tenant compensation requirements, planners influence when redevelopment can proceed and what protections tenants receive when displacement occurs. These conditions include redevelopment sequencing, enforcement pathways, and administrative coordination. They shape whether housing instability is mitigated or allowed to progress. By centring tenant and organizer accounts as analytic entry points into processes, this dissertation shows how housing stability is shaped by the networks of advice, organizing, and informal knowledge that tenants and organizers describe as they navigate eviction. This analysis explains how planning practice shapes eviction governance and identifies ways planning approvals, tenant protection policies, and related administrative processes can better support tenant stability.