Conditions at 191 St. George St. began to deteriorate around the start of the pandemic in 2020. Johana, a now 49-year-old woman who has lived in the apartment since 2012, noticed immediately.
“It was never like this,” she says. “It just went downhill.”
The privately-owned 10-storey building, located in the heart of the Annex just steps from St. George Station, became infested with cockroaches. Johana says it seemed like the management of the building was changing frequently. None of the managers seemed diligent around maintenance, Johana says.
The Grind is not sharing Johana’s last name as she is concerned about landlord reprisal.
There was a point where the garbage chutes were all closed up, she says, and garbage was left to decay for months. “We were covered in garbage flies.”
Windows had also not been replaced for years, so cold winter air would creep in and leave tenants freezing.
A few years earlier, in 2017, the City of Toronto had launched a program called RentSafeTO to maintain standards in apartment buildings with three or more storey and ten or more units.
The program came about after years of advocacy from tenants’ organizations, including the Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations (FMTA) and Toronto ACORN.
Though Johana’s building has been visited many times by RentSafeTO bylaw officers over the years, she says she and her neighbours find the city’s program to be inconsistent and that it results in a disproportionate administrative burden on tenants.
Speaking in September, she says: “Anytime I’ve called RentSafe, it hasn’t gone very well. They’ve taken a very long time to respond. If I’ve ever reported cockroaches, they come and do a walk, and if they don’t see any, the case is basically closed.”
Some amendments to the program have been ushered in this year. As of June, building owners are now required to display colour-coded signs that indicate the property’s RentSafeTO score. Green is defined as “satisfactory” by the city, yellow means “needs improvement” and red indicates the building “needs significant improvement.”
The city states the goal of the signs is to make building conditions more transparent to the public.
Now, with the municipal election campaign in full swing, renters and some tenant organizations are asking where the candidates stand on further improving RentSafeTO.
“[Mayor Olivia] Chow’s made some decent headway in terms of RentSafe,” says An Pham, an organizer with the Toronto Tenant Union. But, “by and large, even under Chow, the shift has been to a more developer-friendly regime, more condo developments and all the mass displacement we are racing to deal with,” they say.
As for Chow’s main mayoral contenders, Brad Bradford and Chris Alexander, Pham says that while both claim to care about renters, they don’t trust the two candidates will hold landlords accountable.
For Pham, improvements to RentSafeTO would mean ensuring that city inspections result in “real consequences” for landlords.
Building owners are required in Toronto to register for the RentSafeTO program and renew their involvement annually. Bylaw officers must evaluate a building at least once every two years.
Inspections involve examining the building across 50 categories, which include common areas, parking, security systems, exterior walkways and grounds, along with cleanliness, pests and general cosmetic concerns.
These categories are divided into groups based on risk to tenant safety. For instance, balcony guard maintenance is considered “high risk” while any graffiti is considered a low risk, “cosmetic” issue.
Under RentSafe, any tenant service requests must be responded to by a landlord within seven days. For more urgent requests including heating or water, they have to reply within 24 hours. However, these timelines aren’t always respected.
Under Chow’s leadership from 2023 to 2026, city hall doubled the number of RentSafeTO enforcement staff (now 60 full-time staff) and introduced steeper fines for landlords. In March of this year, city staff were also given the power to order urgent repairs on rental buildings and send landlords the bill.
A survey conducted by ACORN just before that last power was introduced, however, found that most issues renters contend with in low- and middle-income buildings had not significantly improved since RentSafeTO was introduced in 2017.
Forty-four per cent of tenants reported dealing with cockroaches in 2026, compared with 45 per cent in 2016. A third of tenants reported feeling threatened or targeted for submitting work orders, a statistic that ACORN said has largely remained unchanged over the last decade.
Renter testimonials highlighted by ACORN range from gratitude to bylaw officers for actually compelling their landlords to make changes, to frustration at cases being closed too quickly.
“They don’t do enough,” one testimonial reads. “The landlord can perform patchwork repairs and hire dubious personnel. The repairs do not have a lasting effect but the City counts the file as being completed/closed. There is simply no point in contacting the City for help.”
Nemoy Lewis, an assistant professor in urban planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, says while the city has been making improvements to RentSafeTO, his research shows “that tenants can live for extended periods with recurring mold issues, inadequate heating, broken elevators and pest problems… before an official enforcement record is actually made.”
Tenants often must continually photograph conditions, repeatedly contact management, navigate the legal system with fellow tenants — including in cases of fighting above-guideline rental increases — all before the city even steps foot in the building, he says. “We’re relying too much on the tenants to do that heavy lifting.”
The city needs to proactively contact tenants, particularly when the 311 calls are merely the visible portion of what renters are contending with, Lewis says.
“Some folks might not call 311 because they don’t want to face any reprisal.”
If a landlord repeatedly appears in enforcement records, the city should examine whether tenants are truly satisfied with repairs after they are made, he says. And Toronto should be leveraging the trove of data it has to use its bylaws more effectively.
All three frontrunner candidates – Chow, Bradford and Alexander — should understand overall that there needs to be stronger accountability in the RentSafeTO program, he says.
As of publication, none of the mayoral candidates have published their platforms in full. Chow, though, points on social media to changes made to RentSafeTO as part of her bid for re-election. So far, neither Bradford nor Alexander have mentioned the program.
All three candidates have spoken about how they would work to increase housing supply (which housing experts have pointed out doesn’t necessarily drive down prices).
The Grind asked Chow, Alexander and Bradford about their stance on RentSafeTO and if they would make changes if elected or re-elected. None of the candidates responded by deadline.
Josh Matlow, who represents St. Paul’s in midtown, says Toronto residents can examine the voting records of Chow and Bradford to understand where they stand on programs like RentSafeTO.
Bradford voted in 2025 against introducing RentSafeTO’s colour-coded building rating system.
Matlow acknowledges that RentSafeTO has a “lot more work to do” to improve the program, but said he’s proud of the changes so far.
In mid-September, Johana said she had a more positive experience with RentSafe. For the first time, a staff member for the program asked her to send all the records she had of issues, including photos of pest problems.
“I thought to myself: ‘Wow, this is the first time I’m being heard,’” she says. Previously, RentSafeTO bylaw officers weren’t interested in her photos.
However, the stress of living in the building is far from alleviated. Johana and her fellow tenants are fighting an above-guideline rent increase that would see their rents increase by 5.1%, all due to replacing windows that Johana believes should have been replaced decades ago.
That kind of tenant mobilizing is what some organizers continue to urge renters to consider. It can be far more effective to get together with neighbours and directly confront landlords to get repairs or fight rent increases, instead of hoping for a solution from government programs like RentSafeTO or the Landlord and Tenant Board.
The site manager at 191 St. George St tells The Grind that Aplomb Properties, which manages the building, is working to improve the RentSafeTO score of 77 out of 100, which puts the building in the “needs improvement” category. The site manager also says that “any resident who requests an in-unit [pest] treatment receives prompt service” and that rent increases “are in line with the provincial guidelines.”
Johana says she just wants the city to do what’s possible to support long-term tenants who are key to Toronto’s social fabric. She’s not asking for a gym or a pool or a fountain.
“I just want it to be clean and pest-free. That’s it.”
UPDATE, Sept. 29. 2026: After receiving an additional communication from management at 191 St. George St., the article has been updated to clarify that the landlord had provided comment by publication time, that it was the management and not the owner that appeared to be changing frequently, and that the landlord does not share Johana’s opinion that the windows should have been replaced decades ago.
This article appeared in the 2026 Oct/Nov issue.
