From delay to dispossession: Eviction as slow violence in Toronto’s bureaucratic housing system

This article examines eviction in Toronto, Canada, as a racialized and bureaucratically coordinated form of slow violence. Eviction is often framed as a legal or policy issue, yet this study shows how displacement unfolds through institutional delays, misrecognition, and procedural ambiguity that intensify harm experienced by systemically marginalized tenants. Drawing on 24 tenant interviews, detailed tribunal observations, Critical Race Theory, and Institutional Ethnography, the analysis identifies four interconnected harms: anticipatory surveillance, epistemic erasure, legal ambiguity, and relational dispossession. These harms demonstrate eviction as an extended condition of vulnerability structured by race, time, and administrative practice. Building on Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, the article argues that planning timelines, tribunal delays, and legal scripts operate as mechanisms of racialized harm. The analysis introduces administrative drift as a way to understand how bureaucratic inaction, silence, and repetition organize dispossession. Eviction is shown to be a spatial and temporal process of racialized governance that requires sustained scholarly and policy attention to bureaucratic time, credibility, and institutional responsibility.