It was cold. That’s the first thing Becca Young remembers about Jan. 15, 2022.
The second thing she remembers is the smoke from down the street billowing up into the sky.
A four-alarm fire had broken out in the three-storey rental 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 snow melted by the flames quickly froze in the -15 C weather.
“There was no ability to retrieve property or even to rescue some of the animals,” she said.
Young, a community organizer, worked with one of her neighbours, 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 can be replaced. Severe fires can be life-altering — but they don’t affect all Torontonians equally.
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, according to Toronto Fire Services (TFS) data from 2018 to 2022.
During that five-year period in Toronto, 76 residents died and another 566 were injured in fires. 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, at $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 the fourth highest number of resident injuries or deaths from fire: 38.
But a closer look at the ward shows income disparities exist within it.
The highest-earning 10 per cent of households make five times more than the lowest-earning 10 per cent.
Analysis of fires across city wards finds correlation between household income, and injuries and deaths from residential fires.
These numbers aren’t surprising to Douglas Kwan, director of advocacy and legal services for the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO).
“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, a fire in an unlicensed multi-tenant building in Leslieville where one tenant died. An investigation by the Office of the Fire Marshal found no working smoke alarms.
Because affordable housing can be so difficult to find in Toronto, Kwan says 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 St. was one of the most affordable housing options in the area, Young said.
People who lived there included seniors, Ontario Disability Support Program recipients, students and newcomers.
They planned to stay there long-term, Young said, even though it wasn’t perfect. Residents had lodged dozens of complaints with the city, property manager and the tenancy board long before the fire.
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.
There had been a smaller fire in the building on Jan. 4, 2022. And four days before the fire destroyed the building, Toronto fire inspectors found 12 fire code violations — including problems with the building’s smoke alarms.
Tenants were “consistently advocating for themselves,” Young said. “It still wasn’t enough to give them a safe home to live in.”
Tenants who feel their landlords are not maintaining their buildings can file complaints at the Landlord and Tenant Board, but Kwan says backlogs mean they could wait for more than a year to be heard.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
Calculating risk
While income is consistently linked to greater fire risk, it’s not the only factor, said Len Garis, 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.
Garis’ research informed community fire risk reduction dashboards in B.C. and Ontario. The dashboards use census data to determine factors linked to fire risk, such as income, smoking status, resident age and single parent households.
Based on those characteristics, the dashboard determines a relative risk level for a neighbourhood, which in turn helps fire services figure out where interventions might be most useful.
Garis says communities that are proactively providing interventions in at-risk neighbourhoods have seen great results.
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 said in an email, stressing the importance of working smoke alarms.
How we did it
We used “Fire Incidents” data published on Open Data Toronto, which includes data up to Dec. 31, 2022.
Toronto Fire Service 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 2021 census data from Statistics Canada.