Spacing Radio

To prepare you for the Toronto municipal election happening now until October 26, we've prepared an expert panel on the council races that stand out across the city.

Matt Elliott is a Toronto Star Columnist and publisher of the City Hall Watcher newsletter, and Inori Roy is Features Editor at The Local who's been working to track every candidate for every ward in Toronto.

Please enjoy, and don't forget to hit the polls.

In this episode, we talk about the physical and systemic barriers facing people living with a disability who are trying to access housing in Canada.

University of British Columbia Adjunct Professor Colin Phillips and Balanced Supply of Housing Research Manager Alina McKay co-authored the report "The Right to Accessible Housing: Identifying Needs and Building the Right Supply." In it, they document the many challenges people with disabilities face finding and securing safe and appropriate housing.

As McKay says, the right to housing for people with accessibility needs is often ignored from the first interaction:

"When we think the housing journey, we can really think about where discrimination might happen, and the first place it happens is when folks with disabilities... is looking for housing and there's a for-rent sign posted, someone approaches the landlord, 'I'd like to rent this unit,' and the first thing they hear back is, 'Oh, sorry, it's not available.' Because of that first encounter, often that landlord sees someone with a disability and will make the decision. It's discriminating against that person... and we've heard from participants that that happened a lot."

How do we ensure people with accessibility needs have safe, suitable, affordable housing?

First: a little rant about Doug Ford's island airport expansion plans, which have (at least for now) been grounded.

Next, the book Saving Toronto: 10 City Builders Tell Us How is available now. It's a collection of essays organized by themes like governance, transit, and housing. We asked public policy analyst Anne Golden and urban designer Ken Greenberg, who co-edited the book, how it came together, and if we can actually achieve what the title says and save Toronto.

Then, David Shellnutt (The Biking Lawyer) tells us about the double standards Toronto cyclists face from police, compared to motorists, and a violent assault the TPS carried out last June.

We've spoken a lot about community land trusts in this series, and it's been gaining momentum in cities and towns all over Canada. But there are some policy choices that are stalling some land trust projects. Here we bring you two cases from Vancouver, and how these barriers can be removed.

First, we speak to Djaka Blais, executive director of the Hogan's Alley Society. There is a municipal plan in place to rehabilitate an historically Black community, which was ruined years ago when viaducts were built over top of it for an expressway that was never completed, but the plan can't move ahead while those unused viaducts still stand.

And we speak to Andy Bond, executive director of the Downtown East Side Community Land Trust, speaks about his organizations success in acquiring property for affordable housing in this low-income neighbourhood. But the City has also changed zoning in the area that previously mandated 60% non-market housing.

How can policy changes help community land trusts move forward?

The Balanced Supply of Housing research node was formed to imagine real, working solutions to the housing crisis in Canada. But the first step to solving a problem is understanding it.

We've covered many issues with this special series, but the issue we keep returning to is security of tenure (or lack thereof). The BSH has completed various studies into evictions since its inception — why they happen, how, who they impact, and the outcomes — and now they've brought all their evidence, data, and recommendations together into a free book for anyone to access.

University of British Columbia Professor Alexandra Flynn and BSH Research Manager Alina McKay return to The Overhead to tell us about the evictions book, a digital tool for comparing tenants' rights from province to province, and breaking the taboo of talking about evictions.

We've covered a lot of research about housing with out special series The Overhead. But on the main feed, we're bringing you two perspectives on renting in the city.

Tony Irwin is President of the Federation of Rental Housing Providers of Ontario, and he has perspective on how to build more purpose-built rental housing. We also ask him about his support for the controversial provincial Bill 60.

Then we talk to Bruno Dobrusin, organizer with the Toronto South-Weston Tenants Union, about renters' rights, rent strikes, and the creation of a new, city-wide union.

To compliment the latest Eglinton-themed issue of Spacing Magazine, we begin with a celebration. Our regular transit commentators Toronto Star columnist and City Hall Watcher publisher Matt Elliott and York University Urban Geography Professor Patricia Wood return to give their review of the now Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Does it work, what did we learn through the drawn-out process, and are Public Private Partnerships really the best way to build transit?

Then, Toronto Metropolitan University Associate Professor Cheryl Thompson tells us about her latest Spacing article "Golden Mile of Industry: How a recession, city planning, and an immigration wave (re)made a community."

In Ontario, we have rent control on buildings occupied before November 15, 2018. That means the landlords for these buildings can only raise rents for current tenants once a year at a percentage or "guideline" set by the Province. If they want to raise the rent higher, they have to apply for an Above Guideline Increase (AGI), and their stated reasons have to meet certain criteria such as paying for expensive improvements to the building or hiring security.

But researchers have been studying these increases to how and where they're applied, who is affected, if they're being used appropriately.

Two of the researchers studying AGIs are University of Toronto Scarborough Professor Julie Mah and University of Waterloo Associate Professor Martine August. They worry these above guideline increases are being used by landlords as an extra revenue tool or even a means to push tenants out.

To find out how these AGIs affect tenants, we spoke to Douglas Kwan, director of advocacy and legal services at Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario. He questions whether AGIs are even necessary in many cases, when the landlords make more than enough from current rents.

Are rules around rent increases being exploited for profit?

The October 2026 Toronto election may seem like a long way off, but intentions to run have already been declared and campaign plans are well underway. So we asked Spacing co-founder and Toronto Star columnist Shawn Micallef and community crisis worker Diana Chan McNally what we need from our Toronto political leaders.

And we speak to Petra Matar and Alea Reid, winners of the Toronto Public Space Committee's  "To the Loo!" competition about their winning design for the perfect public toilet.

A good news story in recent years is the amount of progress Community Land Trusts (CLTs) have made in communities across the country.

New CLTs are being established, and existing ones are winning by-in from various levels of government, as well as buying up land to preserve as affordable housing in perpetuity, sheltering units from the runaway, unaffordable housing market.

Often, CLTs preserve often overlooked and stigmatized housing such as rooming houses and single room occupancy hotels.

Joshua Barndt is executive director of the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (PNLT) in Toronto, one of the first CLTs to rekindle this model in Canada. First, the PNLT was able to acquire property for affordable housing, then the City of Toronto created the Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition program (MURA) to help create CLTs across Toronto. We asked Joshua what is needed to scale up, and out, and replicate for other communities.

Norm Leech is the president of the Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust. They're just begging their mission in Vancouver's famously impoverished downtown. Norm tells us how this CLT uses a decolonized governance structure, co-led by Indigenous peoples, and with tenant-led programming.

How can we help communities secure affordable housing for their neighbours?