Episode 592: In The Seats With....Jamie Kastner and 'Charlotte's Castle'

The current housing crises do more then just take the roof from over people's heads...On this episode we're diving into a very relevant documentary on many levels that is streaming for free on tvo.org and is happening in our own backyard.  It's time to enter 'Charlotte's Castle'.Charlotte’s Castle is the story of a cultural hub’s real estate borne crisis, told through one remarkable rental building and its remarkable inhabitants. It chronicles the battle of a quirky cast of unlikely activists who want to hang on to their rented homes against a foreign-owned developer they fear will ruin a cultural landmark, of which they consider themselves the caretakers. Spadina Gardens, the half-block mid-rise apartment at Spadina and Lowther, built in 1904, is the oldest Toronto building to maintain its original floor plans, not to mention many original details (subway tiles that pre-date the subway by half a century!). Vast, luxurious rental units have drawn an equally eclectic mix of tenants: literary, industrial, operatic, distressed gentlefolk to ascending rock stars. They embody the creative class who drew developers to Toronto in the first place, driving property values up. But now, though their plight is understandably often overshadowed by harder luck stories, even they are no longer able to afford the city which they helped to enrich.  The struggle over the preservation of Spadina Gardens is emblematic of the battle, secretly at the heart of the national current housing crisis.It's a film that's told with heart and humor as director Jamie Kastner manages to tackle a very serious subject that is happening in cities all across North America and give it some genuine panache and style.Kastner is a filmmaker whose always trying to shine a light on something relevant in our world while still maintaining a genuine sense of entertainment to anything that he puts on the screen.We had the pleasure of sitting down with Jamie to talk about the origins of the story, the realties that he discovered while making the documentary and so very much more.Charlotte's Castle is available for free on TVO.org now.