(This story is a collaboration between the Investigative Journalism Foundation and CBC Toronto.)
It was cold. That’s the first thing Becca Young remembers about Jan. 15, 2022. The second thing she remembers is the smoke, billowing up into the sky, from down the street.
A four-alarm fire had broken out in the three-storey affordable building at 828 Shaw St. in Toronto, a few blocks south of her home. After firefighters put out the blaze, little remained of the structure that nearly 20 people called home. Four residents were taken to the hospital, one with life-threatening burns.
Once the fire was extinguished, the water from fire hoses and surrounding snow that melted from the flames quickly froze in the -15 degree weather. “There was no ability to retrieve property or even to rescue some of the animals,” she said.
Young is a community organizer. She worked with a neighbour, Gloria Britstone, who led efforts to find places for tenants to stay, raise funds and collect donations of clothing and other necessities tenants may have lost in the fire.
But not everything could be replaced. One senior tenant “had a written address book with everybody that mattered to him,” said Young. “His sister, the people that he could get in touch with, and he couldn't get that. [It] was frozen in the room.”
Severe fires can be life-altering. But they don’t affect all Torontonians equally. Toronto Fire Services (TFS) data from 2018 to 2022 show the number of civilian injuries or deaths from fire incidents in the city’s lowest-income ward was nearly five times greater than the highest-income ward.
Between 2018 and 2022, 76 residents died and another 566 were injured in fires across Toronto. Firefighters were involved in an additional 97 fire-related injuries over the same time period.
In ward 13, Toronto Centre, 52 residents died or were injured in fire incidents, more than any other ward in the city. Toronto Centre has a median household income of $65,000, the lowest of all 25 wards.
The ward with the highest median household income is Ward 25, Scarborough-Rouge Park which has a median household income of $105,000. It saw 11 injuries and deaths from fires, tied with Eglinton-Lawrence for the second fewest.
There were some outlier communities, like Beaches-East York, which has a median household income of $89,000 ($5,000 more than the city overall), but had the fourth highest number of resident injuries or deaths from fire with 38.
But a closer look at the ward shows income disparities exist in the area. The highest-earning 10 per cent of households make five times more than the lowest-earning 10 per cent.
WATCH: Residential fires affect Toronto neighourhoods unequally
To Douglas Kwan, director of advocacy and legal services for the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO), these numbers aren’t surprising.
“Oftentimes when we hear about [severe] fires, it's because the landlord hasn't put smoke alarms on every floor or the smoke alarms are not functioning properly,” Kwan said.
He pointed to one example of a fire in an unlicensed multi-tenant building in Leslieville where one tenant died. An investigation by the Office of the Fire Marshal did not find working smoke alarms in the residence.
Because affordable housing can be so difficult to find in Toronto, Kwan said tenants are often faced with a choice: “Do I live in a home that I can afford without any functioning smoke alarms? Or am I couch surfing?”
“They lost everything”
The low-rise apartment complex at 828 Shaw was one of the most affordable housing options in the area.
People who lived there included seniors, Ontario Disability Support Program recipients, students and newcomers. They planned to stay there long-term, Young said.
But it wasn’t perfect. Residents had lodged dozens of complaints with the city, property manager and the tenancy board long before the fire, Young said.
There had been a smaller fire in the building on Jan. 4, less than two weeks earlier. Four days before the major fire destroyed the building, Toronto fire inspectors found 12 fire code violations including problems with smoke alarms in the building.
Tenants were “consistently advocating for themselves,” Young said. “It still wasn't enough to give them a safe home to live in.”
The owner of the building recently died. His daughter declined to be interviewed for this story, but said she is sorry about what happened, and that her father had dementia at the time, which likely impaired his decision-making.
Tenants who feel their landlords are not maintaining their buildings can file complaints at the Landlord and Tenant Board. But backlogs mean tenants could wait for more than a year to be heard, Kwan said.
“In the midst of a housing crisis, it's even more important that we have a functioning adjudicative body… we don't have that right now.”
“If the only body where you can assert your rights is not working, then what you have, essentially, in the housing market is the wild west,” he said.
Calculating risk
Len Garis is an adjunct professor at the University of the Fraser Valley and former fire chief for Surrey, B.C. He studies how population characteristics inform fire risk. While income is consistently linked to greater fire risk, it’s not the only factor, he said.
His research informed Community Fire Risk Reduction Dashboards for B.C. and Ontario. The dashboards take census data to determine factors linked to fire risk including income, smoking status, resident age and single parent households.
Based on those characteristics, the dashboard determines a relative risk for a neighbourhood to help fire services figure out where interventions might be most useful.
“The leading cause of fires is still smoking, believe it or not,” Garis said. Cooking and electrical sources are also common, depending on the season, he said. “It depends on what sort of accommodation that they have as well. Are they owners? Are they renters?”
Calculating risk can help fire departments target interventions to communities that are more at risk and limit deaths and injuries. Garis said communities that are proactively providing interventions in at-risk neighbourhoods have seen great results.
Garis said a national version is expected to be released in the next couple years.
Sean Driscoll, public relations officer for the Office of the Fire Marshal (OFM) of Ontario said the new Ontario Community Fire Risk Reduction Dashboard, which was launched in March, will allow fire departments to identify factors, including income, to determine which areas are at risk of fire and tailor prevention programs accordingly.
“The goal is to reduce fire rates, injuries and deaths across the province,” Driscoll wrote.
He stressed the importance of working smoke alarms. Data from the National Fire Information Database, on which the dashboard is based, shows that in the areas studied, fire death rates were lower in homes with working smoke alarms. “Homes without a working smoke alarm, including those without an installed alarm or the status is unknown, accounted for nearly 75 per cent of fire fatalities.”
How we did it
We used “Fire Incidents” data published on Open Data Toronto, which includes data up to Dec. 31, 2022. TFS data shows in which wards fires took place, and the number of “civilian casualties” for each incident. “Casualties” in the TFS data refers to both injuries and deaths.
Toronto is split into 25 wards of roughly equal population. Median income data was isolated from the Ward Profiles dataset on Open Data Toronto. Profiles are built using Statistics Canada 2021 Census data.