"Some of the tenants have lived in this building for over 50 years, and a lot of those people are [on] fixed incomes," said Megan Kee, a tenant who's helping to organize residents.
"They're low income, they're young families, they're seniors, and they can't afford to go anywhere else."
The Yonge-Eglinton area, because of its proximity to transit, has been identified by the province as a neighbourhood ripe for additional housing. The developer, Menkes, filed the rezoning application in 2021. It calls for the properties from 55 to 75 Brownlow to be demolished and replaced with three condo towers of 45, 40 and 35 storeys.
The city is trying to reassure a worried group of tenants in a Scarborough low-rise they they will not be homeless when a developer demolishes their building in a year or so.
But without any written deal laying out where they'll be able to move to, or how much rent they'll be asked to pay, those reassurances seem to be falling on deaf ears.
"It's very scary," Monika Little, a pensioner in her 70s who's lived in her one-bedroom apartment for 23 years, told CBC Toronto earlier this week.
Delroy Curling just wants to return to the downtown Toronto apartment he lived in for 47 years.
The long-time renter was told he had to leave 11 Walmer Rd. in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood, where he was paying about $1,300 a month, three years ago for a renovation.
Curling, 85, is on a fixed income. He's now paying about $400 more monthly for a smaller unit on the same street as he waits out a project that has dragged on for years, despite all external signs of it being complete and many new tenants moving into the building.
The absurdity of Toronto’s housing market is on full display here as it makes financial sense for a developer to tear down a perfectly good building housing hundreds of people to build bigger. And this isn’t the only one.
The climate implications of tearing down perfectly good buildings are profound here as the embodied energy and materials that went into building these two will be wasted, and more energy expended to destroy them. What responsibility do developers have to not just build as green as possible, but avoid unnecessary teardowns?
