LARISA GUTMANIS

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Larisa Gutmanis is a local artist and film-maker, who recently completed a Masters in Arts at Ryerson University. Her final project, The Parkdale Experience, was featured in CBC Arts, Inside Toronto, and Huffington Post. Since we last talked with Larisa in November 2017, she had secured new lodgings and was preparing for a January move. 

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How long have you lived in Parkdale, and when did you begin to have issues with housing insecurity?  

 

I’ve lived in Parkdale for almost six years, and initially I moved in with a friend who owned a house in the area. So for quite a while, I was just renting out a room from her. But then, last summer, she decided to downsize, and move to another city. When she told me, I was like, “No problem. I’ll just go find a place of my own.” But then I started seeing the craziest rental units. Some of them didn’t even have a kitchen, just a microwave and a college fridge—and they'd be going for $850.

 

I couldn’t actually believe what I was seeing, and the people showing these place would say, “This is fine for $850, this is what you’re going to get.” One place wanted to charge $900 for just a single room and a shared common area—which would mean all of the furniture and things I’d accumulated over the years would have to be put in storage, basically raising my monthly rent by $300 or more. To live in a small room! It just wasn’t making sense. And I saw about five or six places like this, until a friend of mine forwarded me a listing on Facebook, advertising a space. And that’s how I came to live in the house I’ve been living in, on Spencer—the one I’m now having to leave.

 

That leads directly into my next question. Can you talk about your current living situation?

 

The place I’m living in now is a basement apartment: two main rooms, and a kitchen and bathroom. I live underneath a family of four, and it’s very loud. It's a really good thing I’m not noise-sensitive.

 

My current landlords have also decided to sell their place, and the hope was that I would be able to stay after they found a buyer. But the new owners don’t want anybody living in their basement, so I’ve been asked to leave. I was sent an N-12 form by the present owners, and I have 60 days to get out of the house.

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Luckily, there is a new rule that went into effect, which states that if you’re being evicted, you get one month’s rent compensated to you. So I went to Parkdale Legal Clinic yesterday to get that information, and basically find out what my rights were. They were really helpful. If anyone ever needs similar help, that’s a great resource in the neighbourhood.

 

So, this is the second time I’m being evicted from my apartment in a year and a half. The thought of moving again is kind of insane, and just emotionally and physically taxing. It’s also a very bad time of year to actually find a place; there is nothing out there, nothing at all. I’ve been riding my bike around the neighbourhood, looking for lease signs in windows because that is often the best way to find a place in this area. There is nothing available, nothing in the windows, not one sign.

 

And moving is expensive, packing up is time consuming. It’s not just looking for a new place; it’s actually trying to move from one place to another, then trying to get settled again. I’ve been looking online, but again, there’s absolutely nothing. I’m getting concerned about staying in Parkdale, because now other people are starting to tell me, “Well maybe you can’t stay in the neighbourhood.” And when I hear that, my heart just sinks. Because I’ve lived here for six years, I’ve developed a camaraderie with certain people in the neighbourhood. For instance, there’s a woman who rides down my street on her tricycle, she’s a really eclectic dresser, and I just love seeing her in the mornings. And she's just one of many people that I see every day, and if I didn’t see them, I wouldn’t feel like I’m part of this neighbourhood.  

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Some of your recent artistic work has been directly concerned with personalizing the neighbourhood’s worsening affordability crisis. At last year’s “Spring into Parkdale” Festival, you staged “The Parkdale Experience,” an immersive theatrical performance and scavenger hunt, in which participants were carefully guided through realistic scenarios of housing precarity and the search for affordable rents. Can you talk about how that came about?

 

Well, I was completing a Masters in Arts at Ryerson and I started to toy with the idea of creating a televised scavenger hunt, centring on the community here in Parkdale. Originally it was meant to be something quite small. But then I went to my supervisor and she was like, “No, no, no. This is a major project.” I’d already done more than two months of research on an entirely different project, so I had to take a week and think it over. Eventually, I decided to take a chance on what eventually became “The Parkdale Experience.” And I’m so glad I did: it was really great timing. By the time my project hit, the whole affordable housing crisis was blowing up—Rent strikes, the whole thing.

 

What eventually became the through line of “Parkdale Experience” wasn’t necessarily a story of what you can do about the crisis; it was more the story of people who need affordable housing. For instance, if you’re being evicted from your apartment, what can you do, what actions can you take, how do you look for new, affordable housing? That might entail getting another job to afford a higher monthly rent, which in turn means  completing an interview to get the job. Or in cases where people find affordable housing in a new neighbourhood—how are they going to get to work, or visit their friends, if they don’t have access transportation? Finding a solution might involve going to a bike store, trying to find a used bike for sale… The scavenger hunt was staged in such a way that participants were exposed to all of the obstacles that you might face when you’re forced to move.

 

But why a scavenger hunt?  What inspired you to organize this performance with this specific idea in mind?   

 

That kind of came out of my childhood experiences attending a Latvian summer camp in Quebec. A lot of the programming was similar to other North American camps—swimming, games, sports, and hiking… But there was one activity, called šķērslu gājiens, that set our camp apart from the rest. Basically, a šķērslu gājiens is a participatory story-based treasure hunt based on Latvian history or folklore. As campers, you’d be put into teams, but you wouldn’t have a say in putting those teams together. And that meant inclusivity, because instead of all the fourteen-year-old girls banding together, a group would consist of one six-year-old girl, one ten-year-old boy… It would be full of people you wouldn’t usually hang out with. So that’s one of the things I was hoping to promote in “The Parkdale Experience,” creating a space where people from different walks of life would come together and have a conversation about what’s going on. Some people were from the neighbourhood, some people weren’t.

 

And in a sense, I wanted to scramble some of the socio-economic divisions I see in Parkdale: hipsters hang out mostly with hipsters, middle-income families hang out with middle-income families. There isn’t enough cross-cultural communication going on in the neighbourhood, which i think is a big problem. It’s a little too segregated. I mean, everybody wants to hang out with their own, that’s a given. It’s just human nature. But it can’t always be that way, especially if you want to try and solve issues affecting everybody in the community.

 

Given the project’s efforts to balance personal stories with widespread social problems, like gentrification or class segregation: how do you relate your own struggles with housing insecurity to larger social trends—either in Parkdale, or Toronto more generally?

 

First and foremost, I think the cost of living in Toronto is becoming insurmountable. I don’t know whether the government is going to do anything to actually put a stop to it. Even just capping the rents on properties would be something.

 

I used to live in New York, and I saw gentrification happen there too. I was living on the Lower East Side and it was quite astounding, the prices increased dramatically, to the point that I ended up leaving the neighbourhood. It got too expensive, it didn’t have the facilities or the stores that I needed anymore, almost everything had become bars and restaurants. That’s what the Lower East Side was becoming.

 

And I kind of see the same thing happening here. I’m looking at places now and I can’t afford anything. And all the time I'm searching, I wonder how a family—a single mother with two kids—could afford to live here. There’s no way they can. Eventually, they’ll have to get out, not even to the suburbs, because it’s unaffordable there as well. They’ll have to move out into rural areas, to actually be able to afford to live somewhere, away from their family, away from their friends. Which is what I’m having the hardest time reckoning with right now—if I have to move, how am i going to get back to Parkdale every day? How will I be able to sit in a café, or see my old neighbours passing by every morning, or just be present, as a community member, every day? It’s really sad. 

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