By Jamie McEvoy: Who pays the price for displacement? London votes for renoviction protections

Renoviction – the practice to push out long term tenants under the guise of doing massive renovations – has become increasingly common. Given the lack of vacancy control, landlords across the country are forcing out long term tenants using this predatory tactic so that they can raise the rent exponentially between tenancies. Not surprisingly, this is happening coast to coast as housing is seen as a commodity and not a human right.

While laws at the provincial level offer some tenant protections against renovictions in theory, in practice they are not enough. That’s why tenants are organizing and demanding that cities step in. Cities have the power to do so and can take bold steps to protect tenants and preserve affordable housing. Thanks to ACORN, a community union of low- and moderate-income people, some cities are moving forward.

In 2019, I worked with ACORN as a city councillor in New Westminster, BC to make amendments to our existing Business Regulations and Licensing (Rental Units) Bylaw to ensure that tenants had strong protections against renovictions. The key elements of the bylaw were licensing and the requirement for landlords to provide temporary housing to impacted tenants. Because of these changes, the city went from seeing more than 300 renovictions to zero.

Since then, it is encouraging to see many other cities follow suit. Based on this successful policy, Hamilton marked a first in Ontario to pass an anti-renoviction bylaw earlier this year. Most recently, the anti-renoviction bylaw in London has come up for discussion at the Community and Protective Services Committee. This is great news. But the not so good news is that the bylaw in its current form fails to address a critical question – where are tenants supposed to go if they are displaced, even temporarily?

Renovictions commonly occur in older, rent controlled apartments where tenants have lived for 5, 10, 20+ years. Their rents are often closer to $1,000/month. According to Rentals.ca’s latest monthly report, the average rent in London is $2,216 for a two-bedroom apartment. In a time when many residents are living paycheck to paycheck, how are tenants supposed to find an extra $1,000/month for rent, even if it’s just for a few months or a year? The truth is they can’t.

To address this problem, New Westminster’s renoviction bylaw requires landlords seeking to vacate their units for renovations to provide temporary housing at a similar rent. Hamilton’s renoviction bylaw gives landlords the flexibility to provide temporary accommodations OR a rental top up similar to Toronto’s rent gap payment in cases where housing is demolished for redevelopment.

Rental top ups help bridge the gap between what a tenant’s current rent is and what they will be paying if they were evicted. As per a CMHC report, rents in turnover units far exceed those of non-turnover units. Turnover units are defined as those occupied by a new tenant during the 12 month survey period. The difference between turnover and non-turnover units is as high as 31% in the Greater Toronto Area. As you can see, renovictions are very lucrative for the landlords doing them. For city intervention to be effective, new rules must make renovictions less profitable by putting the onus of preventing tenant displacement on the property owner.

London’s city staff report claims that given the housing crisis, landlords will not be able to find temporary accommodation and that they will apply for exemptions en masse, resulting in city staff being overwhelmed responding to individual cases. This was never our experience in New Westminster.

That fear could wind up leading council in a way that isn’t based on the reality of the experience of our city, or those other cities that have implemented such a measure, and I would encourage city staff to reach out, rather than be at risk of inadvertently misguiding city council, where seeking the facts from the actual experience of the cities involved would show otherwise.

Rather, the housing crisis is exactly why such temporary accommodations, rental top ups or rent gap payments are needed in the first place. If these measures are built into London’s bylaw then staff won’t have to spend time mediating between landlords and tenants. Importantly, this is not the first time a city will be doing so. Hamilton already has these provisions in its anti-renoviction bylaw. There’s also Toronto and Burnaby – both have a provision for rental top ups for tenants in cases when the landlord wants to demolish the building.

Putting the financial responsibility on landlords to support tenants with temporary housing during the renovation process is critical to prevent the growing incidence of homelessness. As the anti-renviction bylaw moves ahead to city council on September 24th, hopefully councillors can take a step back and do it right the first time.

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Written by Jaimie McEvoy, I am a City Councillor in New Westminster, British Columbia.