Navigating the System: Tenant Strategies and the Everyday Life of Eviction in Toronto

This article examines eviction in Toronto as a process situated within Canadian housing governance and broader histories of state restructuring, shaped by overlapping legal, planning, and municipal systems that reproduce social and spatial inequities. Drawing on 24 tenant interviews and 110 Landlord and Tenant Board hearing observations, it introduces the concept of the systemic life of eviction to trace how bureaucratic routines, digital systems, legal scripts, and institutional silences intersect to produce displacement. Two dynamics emerge: (1) administrative harm rendering eviction procedurally inevitable, and (2) tenant resistance grounded in relational care and informal knowledge. While planners are rarely visible in individual cases, their zoning decisions and redevelopment priorities shape the structural conditions that sustain eviction across Toronto’s housing landscape. Using the frameworks of racial capitalism and institutional ethnography, the article examines how institutional logics obscure responsibility and normalize harm within everyday governance. It centres tenants as interpreters of institutional systems whose survival strategies reveal how responsiveness operates within eviction governance, extending a recent systems-level framework to the Canadian context and offering comparative insight for global housing scholarship.