April 18, 2016 – Anna Mehler Paperny, Global News
Jaimi Zammit left North Vancouver to escape unreachable rents but they followed her — north along the Sea-to-Sky highway to Squamish, where she and her family found themselves renting a $2,000-a-month house on an income of $2,000 a month.
October 28, 2014 – Anna Mehler Paperny, Global News
The good news: You’re the new mayor of Toronto.
The bad news: You’re the new mayor of Toronto, a city that’s spent much of the past four years making its city hall an international punchline.
Rebecca Pilgrim stands in the kitchen of her apartment on the 14th floor of a high rise building in Toronto's east end.
(Photo by Chris Young for The Globe and Mail)
Wednesday, January 12, 2011 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
The apartment high-rise capital of Canada is increasingly becoming a city of vertical poverty. More than ever, Toronto’s low-income population is concentrated not only by neighbourhood but by building – in the 50-year-old concrete slab towers clustered around the inner suburbs, according to numbers provided to The Globe and Mail.
Many are decrepit and crumbling; their elevators are so unreliable that a United Way report coming out Wednesday calls for a task force specifically targeting their repair. Thousands of interviews with residents indicate these buildings have grown notorious for vermin and vandalism.
But the 1,000 privately owned rental towers scattered throughout the city are also home to a significant portion of Torontonians. And in a condo-heavy market where almost no one is investing in new purpose-built rental housing stock, the aging structures represent the bulk of affordable housing.
a business of misfits 