Meet the woman behind the city ’s worst apartment building

Dear reader,

The most notorious address in Toronto is 500 Dawes Road, a 14-storey apartment building in the east end. It’s owned by a woman named Carolyn Krebs, who also goes by Carolyn Goodman, except when she goes by Marian Linton as a way of evading justice. You see, it’s hard to be held responsible for the mistreatment of hundreds of low-income tenants when no one knows your real name or where to find you. And a lot of people wish to find her.

Krebs may be the most hated landlord in Toronto. 500 Dawes has the dubious distinction of being one of the city’s most complained-about buildings—595 grievances have been filed over the past six years. Residents live with bedbugs, roaches and mice. The ceilings leak, and the windows are drafty. When appliances break, repairs take ages if they happen at all.

The public record is filled with other examples of Krebs’s malfeasance. She has attempted to deny housing to a tenant with a disability, evicted tenants unjustly and then thrown out their belongings before they could retrieve them, and pressured an employee to lie on her behalf before an adjudicator. She has admitted that her aliases help her elude tenants.

Many of Krebs’s tenants are on disability, earning a maximum of $1,300 per month, which is enough to cover rent but not much else. For them, 500 Dawes is the place of last resort, one step away from a shelter or the streets. Perversely, Krebs has found a way to cash in on this marginalized population. She knows they often lack the resources to fight back.

Our investigative exposé of Krebs by journalist Rachel Browne comes at a time of unprecedented tension between renters and landlords. The cost of living has never been higher, yet wages lag far behind. Many renters have found solidarity and power by banding together to withhold their rent. It’s clearly not a viable long-term solution, but they see no better option.

Browne attempts to figure out who Krebs is, how she operates and where she’s holed up. Her reporting is as riveting as her message is disturbing: Krebs isn’t the only landlord exploiting desperate tenants. She has merely perfected the art.

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Carolyn Krebs (alias Carolyn Goodman, alias Marian Linton) may be the city’s most hated landlord. She ignores work orders, falsifies documents and evicts tenants without cause. How one woman is making a killing off a system that’s too broken to stop her.

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