The Energy Mix: Ottawa Tenants Demand Protection Amid Extreme Weather, Renovictions

Low-income renters in Ottawa often endure extreme heat and cold in aging buildings with unreliable appliances and energy inefficiency, a recent survey has found.

Amid distrust toward landlords and neglected upgrades, tenants are calling for urgent government intervention to address the dual crises of climate change and housing.

Over the past year Ottawa ACORN, a community union representing low- and moderate-income individuals, built a citywide network of tenants concerned about climate change issues affecting renters, the group writes in a report released last week. “Our first goal was to better understand the impacts of climate change on tenants, issues in their building leading to greater emissions, and what climate issues were a priority for tenants.”

In a survey [pdf] of 295 tenants across the Canadian capital, ACORN learned that 39% of respondents made less than C$30,000 a year and almost 90% of them lived in a building constructed before 1990. Almost half of them were in buildings that were more than 50 years old.

“A low-rise building constructed before 2005 can use as much as 200% more energy than a similar type of new build,” writes ACORN, and “only 11% of tenants reported that their buildings had been renovated within the past five years to improve energy efficiency.”

More than half the respondents were paying around $1,400 per month in rent, and around one-tenth paid $2,000 or more. A large majority paid separate electricity/hydro bills on top of that. Nearly half said their units were too hot in the summer, 40% did not have air conditioning or cooling, 22% rated air quality as bad or very bad, especially in summer, and 52% had no access to green space. Almost 40% said they didn’t get enough heat in winter, forcing them to buy space heaters to keep warm, with many of them buying multiple heaters. Nearly a quarter said their appliances didn’t work or had problems.

And nearly 60% said they didn’t trust their landlords to put the interests of tenants first.

“Increased rent and energy costs have long been outpacing wages and fixed incomes,” circumstances which now leave tenants largely unable to afford to protect themselves against the ever-increasing dangers of climate impacts like heatwaves and wildfire smoke, ACORN writes. And tenants are vulnerable to being “renovicted” as landlords move to retrofit their holdings, with laws allowing them to “pass down the costs of capital expenditures onto their tenants through exorbitant rent increases called ‘Above-Guideline-Increases’ (AGIs).”

On the rise across Ontario, such renovictions and so-called demovictions—evictions to demolish the housing and replace it with a luxury rental unit condo—have increased by 545% in Ottawa since 2017, writes ACORN. “Often these redevelopments are marketed by developers as ‘green’ and a form of ‘sustainable living’, but we should not have to destroy our limited stock of affordable housing to achieve our climate goals.”

Average rents in Ottawa increased 81% between 2001 and 2021, ACORN adds, so “if a family loses their home as a result of renoviction, they will have nowhere else to go.” The report cites Hamilton as the only city in Ontario that requires landlords to provide temporary accommodations and compensation for tenants whose units are undergoing major renovation.

What Cities Can Do

The report calls on cities consider anti-renoviction bylaws “so that landlords cannot evict tenants and raise the rent when retrofitting the building,” along with rental replacement bylaws.

With extreme heat increasingly affecting urban dwellers, ACORN urges Canadian municipalities to implement a maximum heat bylaw to ensure that temperatures in rental units never exceed the widely recognized safe threshold of 26°C.

Other measures include expanding tree canopies, mandating cool rooms in all apartment buildings, and providing free transit on extreme heat days.

To better protect tenants from substandard housing, and enforce energy efficiency standards, ACORN recommends mandatory energy efficiency labeling and benchmarking, a process that would generate “a publicly accessible map for all residential housing, including multi-unit residential buildings, and require building owners to display their rating label in the building lobby.”

Cities should also “create a rent escrow account so that tenants can pay their rent into the City when the landlord isn’t doing their repairs,” the report adds. “Cities can then use this money to do the needed repairs themselves if necessary.”

Provincial and Federal Action

ACORN urges the Ontario government to repeal Bill 97, which the group says “will allow landlords to increase rents for air conditioning” if it goes into effect. Ontario’s Energy Affordability Program must be expanded to include all rental buildings, a move that would give more tenants access to free heat pumps. Making building-by-building energy efficiency data publicly available would also help tenants.

At the federal level, all green infrastructure retrofit partnerships and agreements should include tenant protections, ACORN says. Funding agreements must include efficiency and mechanical cooling measures for all rental types, from townhomes to high rises.

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Article for The Energy Mix