Gov't responds to eviction spike story
Ontario pledges new tenant act, Toronto Star, 21 Feb 2006
The Ontario government will introduce a new landlord and tenant act this spring that should reduce the number of evictions, Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister John Gerretsen said yesterday.
"What we intend to do in a new piece of legislation (is) to protect the vulnerable people that are good tenants and should not be taken advantage of by landlords," he told reporters yesterday...
Carol Kiley, manager of program development at the tribunal, [said] the numbers of eviction applications may be higher this year based on the sheer volume of renters in the market.
On average, applications to evict increase by about 2 to 3 per cent every year.
"Termination applications increase every time the population increases and we've had a very large population increase," Kiley said.
I will assume Ms. Kiley means the population of renting households (i.e. the quantity of lived-in units), not the population occupying rental housing (i.e. the number of people). All else held constant, the number of eviction attempts should scale with the number of leases (for which the number of units is a rough proxy), not the number of occupants or total population of a city or province.
A ten-point increase in the rental housing stock would be a very large increase indeed. Could the total number of vacant units plus new construction from 2004 to 2005 have accommodated a 10% expansion in the number of occupied rental housing units in Ontario?
Expansion may tell part - but cannot tell all - of the story here.
Update: Some digging at StatsCan produced relevant, if not too recent, data to shed some light on this question. The figures below show the growth and annual change, respectively, in Ontario's rental housing stock.
The closest Ontario's annual rental housing stock growth has ever come to 10% was the 6.8% increase in 1969, which marks the peak of the period when much of Toronto's present high-rise apartment stock (including my current place in North York) was built. That's not growth, that's a boom akin to the recent surge in condo development.
Posted by Greg Smith @ 5:12 a.m.
1 Comments:
I agree, clearly something else is going on here.
Assuming the rate of eviction is constant, it should increase by the same percentage as the total rental stock. That eviction rates are increasing alot faster suggests something else is afoot.
A simple proxy for a "Landlord's Desire to Evict" would be
LDE = Growth in the Rate of Eviction Applications - Growth in the Rental Stock
Clearly its not all-encompasing, but it's a useful enough proxy.
The way tenant procetion currently works is that rental rates are regulated as long as a unit is occupied, otherwise its whatever the landlord sets it at. That means that when market rates for rentals spike upwards landlords face the regulatory price ceilings, which implies that they would rather set higher rates.
Thus, one would expect this LDE proxy to correlate quite strongly with market rental rates. Indeed, the drive towards condominium development is also a sign of high market rental rates, so there'd probably be a strong correlation there to.
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