CapU Anthropology Professor Speaks on Her Research on Air Pollution in Low Income Rental Housing
Written by Farnaz Abdolmaleki (she/her) // Contributor
Visuals by Ryan Coomber (he/him) // Contributor
A woman in a Toronto apartment building wanted the air fresheners taken out of her hallways. That was the whole campaign. Not a rent strike, not a lawsuit. She wanted the plug-ins gone because the smell hit her every time she walked to her door.
Sophia Jaworski, who teaches anthropology at Capilano University, heard that story at a workshop where the people she was interviewing were given cameras and asked to photograph what mattered in their housing. One came back with a picture of the air fresheners. They “made her feel sick every single day,” Jaworski said, and were “not essential for people to access the building.”
Jaworski did not set out to study air. “That wasn’t how I started out my research,” she said. What interested her first was chronic illness that was “supposedly unexplainable.” She embedded herself as an anthropologist at a Toronto environmental health clinic.
A review of patient charts changed what unexplainable meant. A lot of the illness was linked to the environment, she said, just not traceable to one cause. It was cumulative, low-level and high-level exposures adding up over years. That pointed her interest to air, and then at indoor air, since people spend roughly 90 per cent of their time inside.
Much of the fieldwork could not happen in people’s homes, since many of those she interviewed were disabled by chronic illness and could not host a visitor. So she relocated her research to Parkdale, a Toronto neighbourhood where almost everyone rents. There she joined the organizing of the advocacy. The renters were having the hardest time, because their control over what made their housing accessible was so much trickier to navigate.
That work is now a book. Jaworski has a contract with Toronto publisher Between the Lines for one tentatively titled Volatile Housing, about “toxic atmospheres and tenant power.” She is currently interviewing in Vancouver.
Tenants do not automatically breathe worse air, she said. What they face is structural. Social and environmental inequalities mean renters deal with more kinds of unhealthy exposure, and with less say over any of it.
Indoor air is also worse than most people assume. One of the main sources in any home is cooking dinner. Without using the range hood, by her account, you get
“levels similar to some of the worst forest fire smoke days.” Those peaks are short, unlike a smoke season. A Health Canada study of 344 homes found the hood runs during only 18 per cent of cooking, though those homes were owner-occupied houses, not apartments.
In Toronto, she found buildings were spraying pesticides preventively, some as often as monthly, without always telling tenants first. Landlords are legally required to give notice.
Almost nobody is studying the people this impacts. Very little Canadian research focuses on renters, Jaworski said, and even less on low-income tenants in purpose-built and secondary market rental. The research that exists tends to look at non-market housing.
Statistics Canada found renters are three times as likely as owners to report poor indoor air quality, and twice as likely to report mould, mildew or pests.
When asked whether this is collateral damage or the predictable result of a profit-driven system, Jaworski pointed at the system. Part of the answer, she said, is longstanding legal inequality in Canadian tenancy law. This includes the absence of rent control between tenancies, which keeps shaping housing security and health.
Canada largely stopped building non-market housing decades ago, and new rental arrives far above existing rents. With older unmaintained buildings, the problems pile up. Ownership has changed too. Small and family landlords have given way to corporations and real estate investment trusts “treating it like a financial stock or an investment.”
Renoviction is the part students will know. Push out lower-income tenants, relist higher. The pressure is sometimes environmental, and tenants “will have to endure certain conditions that are especially unhealthy” until they evict themselves and the landlord never has to. She qualified that,“not every landlord of that type is like that. You can’t generalize.” What is growing, she says, is the targeting of the oldest, most run-down buildings, where the rent gap is the widest.
That gap is what the book is about. “In my book, I’m calling this the security trap,” she said. “So how you can get stuck in having housing security that might be secure, but it might not be safe.”
The regulatory half she calls: permission to pollute, a term she takes from Dayna Scott, a lawyer at York University. Rather than stopping pollution where it starts, the system treats steady emission as normal as long as it stays below some extreme level. The levels are shaky. They come from animal testing, Jaworski said. Dominantly, this is at the hands of able-bodied white men. For indoor air in Canada there are no legally enforceable limits.
The law has moved, at least on paper. Canada recognized a right to a healthy environment in federal law in June 2023, and the framework for using it was finished only in July 2025. It guides one federal statute and does not reach into a rental unit. Health Canada publishes indoor air guidelines, but they are advisory and no landlord has to meet them. In B.C., section 32 of the Residential Tenancy Act says a landlord has to keep a place in a state of repair that meets health and safety standards. As it is required by law, judged against the age, character and location of the unit.
None of this means she wants anyone panicking. Partly for the reason that renters share the air and there are limits on how much of it they control. But also biologically speaking, air has its own microbiome and scrubbing a home sterile strips out some of what keeps you well.
What she recommends is cheap. Buy a good HEPA filter and strap it to a box fan, she said, which takes out particulate matter. Add an activated charcoal filter if the problem is odour or second-hand smoke. Change the HEPA every six months to a year, and the charcoal every few months. Health Canada publishes safety conditions for homemade units, including a newer certified fan and not leaving one running unattended or overnight.
Mobilizing with each other has also been successful. In Parkdale, tenants used stacked work orders, gathering repair requests across a building and handing the landlord the accumulated pile of asks at once, “and that way it’s harder to target any one tenant.” On your own, she said, “the reality is unfortunately you are vulnerable.”
“We’re used to thinking about this as a private thing, as an individual thing,” Jaworski said. Her argument is that it is not. Indoor air is shared, which makes it a collective problem and a question of social and environmental justice. Most of what goes into the air in a rental building is somebody else’s decision. Your air is your neighbour’s air.
If something in your building is making you sick:
TRAC Tenant Infoline, 604-255-0546 or 1-800-665-1185, tenants.bc.ca. Free legal information for B.C. tenants on repairs, pests and evictions.
Vancouver Tenants Union, vancouvertenantsunion.ca. For organizing with other tenants in your building.
Residential Tenancy Branch. Under section 32 of the Residential Tenancy Act your landlord has to keep the place up to health and safety standards. If you put a repair request in writing and it is ignored, you can apply for a repair order, a rent reduction until it is fixed, or compensation.