Just about anyone who lives in Toronto will tell you that trying to find a home in the city has become a challenge. But for many renters, keeping one has become a challenge too.<\/p>\n
Renovation evictions, colloquially known as ‘renovictions,’ have become a growing concern in the city as housing becomes more competitive and market rents go up.<\/p>\n
The term generally refers to a situation where a landlord takes advantage of their right to renovate a property in order to clear out tenants who may be paying lower rents and to get new ones who pay market rates.<\/p>\n
The practice has long been used by some less scrupulous landlords as a way to circumvent rent controls, which cap the maximum allowable rent increase that can be imposed without approval from the Landlord and Tenant Board.<\/p>\n
While Toronto City Council recently directed staff to draft a bylaw that would make it tougher to carry out renovictions, it won’t go into effect before 2025.<\/a><\/p>\n In the meantime, CP24 reached out to Torontonians who are facing, or who have faced renovictions in the past in order to get a better sense of how the practice impacts people<\/p>\n BACK-TO-BACK RENOVICTIONS<\/strong><\/p>\n Magenta Suzanne was renovicted from her previous apartment at Dufferin and Dundas over a year ago. She wasn’t aware of her rights at the time and her landlord had a serious health issue which deterred her from arguing with him.<\/p>\n She managed to find another one-bedroom apartment just a 12-minute walk away in Parkdale in a 120-year-old building. But she had barely started unpacking her things when the building manager told her that he needed to bring the fire department around to check for “fire code violations.”<\/p>\n “I’ve seen firefighters. They don’t tend to wear Versace. They don’t wear athleisure-wear,” Suzanne says, adding that it was clear they were investors.<\/p>\n “So that all happened literally two weeks into the move. To be honest, I haven’t even fully unpacked because as soon as I moved in, it already felt unsettled.”<\/p>\n A new owner bought the building in August 2023. The previous owner, who lives in Germany, had a property management company running it beforehand and they gave no indication it would be sold when Suzanne signed the lease.<\/p>\n All 10 tenants were eventually told they would need to move out because the new owner planned to renovate the building.<\/p>\n Wanting to make sure that two evictions for renovations wouldn’t somehow damage her chances of finding a new rental, the 52-year-old bartender and voice actor sought help at Parkdale Community Legal Services and found out that she could fight the order.<\/p>\n After she decided to stay, Suzanne says, the renovations proceeded anyway. She feels that the owner tried to make things hard for her. Some of the workers were confrontational with her in the hallways, she says, and they would frequently turn the water off while she was showering without any advance notice.<\/p>\n “I think they got a huge kick out of seeing me run downstairs with wet hair asking them to turn the water back on,” she adds.<\/p>\n But it also felt unsafe, Suzanne says.<\/p>\n She would frequently come home from bartending late at night to find the workers had left the security door propped open.<\/p>\n “I thought there were two guys doing construction on the first floor one night, and it was late, and I went down to tell them it had to stop,” Suzanne recalls. “It was just two homeless men swinging hammers around.”<\/p>\n On another occasion, an axe was swung through her entrance hall wall while workers were renovating a unit next door.<\/p>\n She says her complaints to the workers and the landlord were treated as “meaningless,” whether in writing or in person.<\/p>\n “If I approach him, (the landlord), he just walks away. He doesn’t talk to me.” At this point she thinks she will eventually have to leave. However she says she’s staying in the fight for some of her neighbours who need a voice. That includes one man who is 88 and has lived in the building for 32 years. He’s on a fixed income and is not comfortable enough with technology to search for a new apartment online.<\/p>\n “I’m probably the most active one in the fight,” Suzanne says. “So I mean, I can’t expect someone that’s two years away from being 90 to be active. Yeah, so you know I feel like if I leave this is going to fall apart.”<\/p>\n About half the tenants have since left the 11-unit building. An elderly lady who lived next door to Suzanne passed away during a week when the fire alarm was going off incessantly. Bad arthritis in her legs kept her from leaving her unit each time, so she just had to endure it.<\/p>\n “Those fire alarms are screeching, like they’re so loud. It was a drag for me, but I could leave. But she couldn’t. When she passed away, I was talking to the police and everything, and they were just saying how depressing it was, even for them, to know that this is how she spent her final days,” Suzanne says.<\/p>\n “I just really felt like, you kind of have to figure out what kind of city you want to live in, and you can’t live in the kind where, like (a landlord) can come and kick out 80-year-old people. Then we literally have no future if we have no kindness and no compassion, right?”<\/p>\n At the moment, she pays $1,350 for a small one-bedroom of less than 500 square feet. Anything comparable, she says, would probably cost her around $1,800 now if she has to move again.<\/p>\n “Obviously he (the landlord) is kicking us out so he can charge more. So this building, or this unit, will also be much more money too, right? My understanding is he’s furnishing all the units and probably going to rent them to international students.”<\/p>\n
\nShe acknowledges that may be because she’s plastered hundreds of posters about the renoviction in the area and has organized some of the remaining tenants to fight it.<\/p>\n