Press Hits

London City Council unanimously passed a bylaw aimed at protecting tenants from unfair renovictions, but some advocates say the measures are not enough. Before council’s vote on Sept. 24, around 30 ACORN protesters held a “camp-out” outside city hall. Earlier this year, the City of Hamilton enacted an anti-renoviction bylaw after pressure from ACORN Hamilton. According to London city councillors and city staff, Hamilton’s bylaw inspired London’s proposed restrictions.

Evicted from her apartment, Carol Rogers is glad to have found a new place to live, but fears other tenants who stayed past the eviction date in the building she used to live in could face homelessness. For the London chapter of ACORN Canada, an organization that advocates for tenants, what’s happening to tenants at 435 Nelson St. is a case of “demovictions,” evictions for the purpose of demolishing a building to make more profit from a property.

The residents of 99 Kennedy Road and 51 McMurchy Avenue in Brampton are concerned about their unsafe living conditions while their calls to landlords go ignored. They want answers about the poorly maintained buildings and sometimes unbearable living conditions.

Après avoir reçu un avis de rénoviction en août dernier, Nelda Giroux a participé samedi à une marche dans le quartier Vanier pour dénoncer ce phénomène qui frappe Ottawa de plein fouet. Le phénomène est devenu un véritable fléau à Ottawa, selon le président de la section centrale régionale d’ACORN, Edward Roué.

A new report released by ACORN Ontario says it has connected a landlord with multiple buildings in the province, including here in Waterloo Region, as the “biggest renovictor” in the province. The report alleged that a landlord by the name of Michael Klein is responsible for issuing hundreds of renoviction notices to at least 21 buildings across multiple cities, including Kitchener, Cambridge, London, and Toronto. A renoviction is when a landlord evicts a tenant by saying they need to make major renovations.

A rental property investor is being called Ontario’s most prolific “renovictor” as the federal government prepares new Renters Bill of Rights legislation that promises to take action against evictions for renovation. Michael Klein appears as a director of companies that own at least 21 properties across Ontario where tenants have been sent remarkably similar so-called renoviction letters in recent years according to research conducted by Acorn, an organization with 177,000 members across six provinces representing low and moderate-income families. Among the buildings are 13 where the Acorn is organizing tenants to fight back against what they call bad faith evictions.