Kitchener city council has formally directed staff to begin drafting a potential renoviction bylaw, despite an earlier staff report that advised against implementing one. One delegate at Monday night’s meeting, Elliot Wand of ACORN, told council his building has been nearly emptied through renovictions. “Only myself and two others remain,” he said. “Everyone else has been renovicted.”
The issue of renovictions in Kitchener was front and centre in council chambers on Monday night as a dozen delegates pleaded with city council to move forward with a bylaw. Renovictions take place when a landlord evicts a tenant by claiming they will complete renovations, which range from complete overhauls to a simple paint job. A number of Kitchener residents are in full support of the bylaw, along with Waterloo Region ACORN, a community union of low and moderate-income residents who stand up for renters against bad-faith landlords.
Toronto is only about halfway through its yearlong study into whether it should pass a bylaw forcing landlords to keep their properties cool in the summer, leaving many renters without air conditioning at the mercy of what is predicted to be a sweltering season with an “extremely dangerous” heat wave starting this weekend. “City hall should be focused on passing the bylaw right now — immediately,” said James Maroosis, who lives in a building in Etobicoke without central air, where the humidity has already made the paint on his walls flake off.
Committee members, city staff, and residents were split on Monday night as to whether or not a bylaw would help put an end to renovictions in Kitchener. When it comes to the effectiveness of the bylaw currently in place in Hamilton, Jacquie Wells, chair of the Waterloo Region chapter of ACORN, claims that the statistics show that the bylaw is working. “I just showed you that in Hamilton they’ve had a 99 per cent reduction in the number of N13s issued in the first five months, so even if they receive more in the remaining seven months, this is still a significant reduction,” said Wells.
Tenants of a Guelph apartment complex are celebrating a “huge victory” after a year fraught with worry during a battle to remain in their homes. Last summer, residents in 4, 6 and 8 Brant Ave. found themselves in a legal tangle with notorious renovictor Michael Klein, after a corporation he’s tied to purchased the complex. Klein is a figure associated with numerous other renoviction cases across the province, including in Cambridge and Toronto. Earlier this year, he was dubbed “Ontario’s biggest renovictor” by the tenant advocacy group ACORN, and linked to 21 buildings across Ontario that house an estimated 1,750 tenants.
The City of Kitchener took the first step in implementing a renoviction bylaw to thwart “unscrupulous” landlords on Monday. Pivoting away from a staff recommendation for a more passive approach toward renoviction — which is a forced eviction of a tenant for renovations — by forming a Landlord-Tenant Forum and creating educational tools for landlords and tenants, the planning and strategic initiatives committee voted 6-3 Monday in favour of forming a rental renovation licensing bylaw.
