Gaetan Heroux, Op-ed –
For more than two and a half years, 214-230 Sherbourne Street has been the battleground of a David-versus-Goliath fight between KingSett Capital, one of Canada’s largest private equity companies, and a small group of anti-poverty activists.
The fight began in the fall of 2022, when KingSett applied to build a 47-storey condominium tower after outbidding the city for the property five months earlier. Anti-poverty activists who had been involved in a decade-long fight to get the city to expropriate the properties at Dundas and Sherbourne Streets, revived the campaign when members heard about KingSett’s plans.
The new 230 Fightback group had a bold but simple demand: that the city negotiate with Jon Love, the founder of KingSett Capital, to purchase 214-230 Sherbourne in order to build much-needed social housing. By the summer of 2023 the city was negotiating with KingSett, which continued until the beginning of 2024.
However, the city and the private equity company could not reach a deal. The city was willing to pay a fair market value for the properties, but Kingsett wanted to recuperate all its costs, which according to the city was much more than the land’s market value and what it was willing to pay.
In the fall of 2024 City Council voted in favour of city planners’ recommendation to approve KingSett’s application. An amendment directed city staff to continue discussions with the owners to look at adding ‘affordable housing’ on the 214-230 Sherbourne site.
However, since City Council’s decision, sales of pre-construction condos have crashed. As a result there is no indication that KingSett will be able to move forward with its condo tower plans in the near future.
230 Fightback has been working with other low-income communities that are suffering from the financialization of housing. The group has held forums with representatives from organizations such as No Demovictions and the Toronto Unhoused and Homeless Union. Last summer, 230 Fightback was invited to speak at an event organized by Parkdale Housing Justice, which opposed a KingSett development at King Street and Cowan Avenue.
Recently 230 Fightback attended a meeting of the South York Weston Tenant Union, which has organized rent strikes and taken on large developers, including Dream Unlimited, that it says have been gouging renters with high rent increases.
230 Fightback and its allies are organizing the first People’s Assembly on Housing Justice in Toronto, set for April 25 and 26 in the Moss Park neighbourhood. The assembly will bring together tenants, the unhoused, migrants, asylum seekers and residents from communities organizing on housing issues in low-income neighbourhoods such as York-South Weston, Parkdale, Chinatown, Regent Park and Dundas and Sherbourne. Climate Justice Toronto will also have representatives.
The goal of the assembly is to build a movement for social housing that will take on developers and large private equity companies such as KingSett Capital that have been buying properties in low-income neighbourhoods, resulting in displacement of people from their communities.
230 Fightback continues to call on the city and KingSett to create social housing at 214-230 Sherbourne. At one time the site had four rooming houses with more than 100 tenants, but the properties have been left vacant for more than 16 years. The only building remaining on the site is a boarded-up Victorian rooming house, which survived because of its historical value.
214-230 Sherbourne has become a symbol of the three levels of governments’ inability to address the housing crisis in one of Toronto’s most impoverished neighbourhoods. The vacant lots and shuttered rooming house also illustrate the harmful effect of speculators and the financializing of housing on low-income communities.
Gaetan Heroux is a member of 230 Fightback and co-author of Toronto’s Poor: A Rebellious History
