Expropriation and Refusal: Black Tenants, Racial Capitalism, and the Struggle for Home at Chalkfarm Drive

Abstract

In Canada’s financialized rental housing landscape, the experiences of Black tenants remain obscured by aggregate metrics and sanitized policy discourse. This paper addresses that erasure through a case study of four apartment buildings on Chalkfarm Drive in Toronto’s northwest—properties owned and managed by Greenwin Inc.— where Nigerian newcomers and other renters from the African diaspora have faced systematic eviction threats, infrastructural neglect, and racialized abuse. Drawing on qualitative interviews with current and former tenants, the study illustrates how eviction filings, predatory post-tenancy billing, and chronic disrepair operate as technologies of extraction, targeting the structural precarity of Black migrant households. Tenants report receiving invoices of several thousand dollars for alleged “damages” after vacating their units, irrespective of unit conditions as they expereinced them. These practices point to racialized expropriation enabled by persistent enforcement gaps and institutional contraints in municipal property standards enforcement, alongside a regulatory environment that routinely proves insufficient to deter chronic disrepair and post-tenancy extraction. Rather than isolated examples of mismanagement, these harms reflect a racial capitalist housing order in which disposability is spatialized, normalized, and profitable. Yet within this terrain of abandonment and racialized control, tenants engage in everyday practices of care, refusal, and collective survival that contest their manufactured vulnerability. Their resistance articulates a Black praxis of being that defies the logics of extraction and property and asserts a right to remain rooted in diasporic belonging and spatial justice. By centring these voices, this study contributes to critical debates on eviction, racial capitalism, and housing justice, and calls for abolitionist frameworks that dismantle landlord power while building pathways toward collective ownership and tenant self-determination.