Tenant City

Distilling rental housing policy, tenants' rights and other social justice news for the GTA.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

'Smart metering' for apartments?

McGuinty Government Takes Good First Step with Smart Meter Initiative, CNW Press Release, 28 Feb 2006
Bill 21 allows the Minister of Energy to make smart metering mandatory for condominium units, but ignores rental apartments. Had the government included the metering of rental apartments, overall provincial electricity demand could be reduced by as much as 530 MW or enough energy to power over 331,000 homes. Toronto alone could have reduced demand by 210 MW or power for 125,000 homes...

Currently in Ontario, apartment and condominium buildings are the only areas where there is virtually no relationship between energy consumption and cost. Some 90% of apartment and condominium buildings (1.8 million suites) use a bulk meter for electricity consumption.

The building owner pays the bulk power bill and the cost is equally distributed to residents as part of their monthly rent or common area expense. Residents have no information about their energy usage and therefore no incentive to conserve. In effect, a minority of high energy users in apartments and condominiums have their electricity subsidized by a majority of users.

Stratacon, which issued the above release, would have made a lot of money if the 'smart' electricity meters they sell had been made mandatory. But how would tenants fare?

Conservation advocates such as Energy Probe - along with economists and salesmen - point out that unless tenants are aware of (and forced to pay for) their energy consumption, they lack the information and motivation necessary to make power-saving moves like switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs. They've got a point there, but consumption information and price-signal motivation won't solve the whole problem.

Most energy used in rental housing is consumed in heating, cooking, refrigeration, and (for a lucky few) air conditioning. Just knowing that my old fridge, stove, and baseboard heaters use a ton of electricity doesn't empower me to replace them. Moving from landlord- to tenant-billed hydro eliminates incentives for landlords to upgrade outdated, power-hungry appliances and heating systems or replace draughty windows with newer, better-insulated ones.

A fairer solution would be to allow sub-metering conversions only after landlords have met a minimum standard for energy saving retrofits or subsidized upgrades to their properties. Alternatively, major appliances and heating could be metered seperately from other outlets so that renters are only forced to pay for energy use that they can control.

Additional press: Toronto Star.

Monday, February 27, 2006

Incomplete downloading ties municipal hands on social housing

Counties seeks changes in social housing regs, Brockville Recorder & Times, 27 Feb 2006
Dorothy Theobald, director of social services [for the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville], made a presentation recently in Toronto to Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister John Gerretsen asking for his support to develop specific proposals.

"We have a very old stock of housing, some of it 60 years old, and there are challenges in maintaining it," said Theobald...

One of the crucial questions that needs to be settled is the debentures currently held by the province on buildings downloaded to the municipality eight years ago, she said. Without local control over those debentures, making capital plans for housing improvements is very difficult, she said.

"It is a barrier to doing other things," said Theobald.

"What we need really is flexibility around debentures. The whole mortgage system should be within the municipality. If we can get that, we can take what we have and reinvest to the best of our ability."

The request parallels a similar resolution by the Social Housing Services Corporation in 2004, which called for the transfer of mortgage administration to municipalities to complete the downloading process.

Sunday, February 26, 2006

Creepy contractor sells fast evictions

Entrepreneur zeroes in on problem tenants, Toronto Star, 25 Feb 2006
A Toronto entrepreneur, [Ellen] Weiss may be blazing a trail in the most recession-proof industry of all.

She gets rid of people for a living. Landlords need only call her company, Evictions Inc., and give her a name. No more than six weeks later, Weiss delivers the keys to an empty apartment...

For anywhere from $65 to a "top-of-the-line" $1,000, she will deliver the notices, sit through hearings and pre-hearings, ride along with the sheriff for the actual eviction — and even spruce the apartment up once it's empty.

Time for an aside. How classy is Weiss' business? I can't speak to that point, but what I can tell you is that she uses craigslist and advises clients [click 'tenant selection' on the left of her page to find the following quote] to literally spy on applicants:
See if the prospective tenant takes off their shoes when entering your property. Take a look in their car if they have one. See if it is tidy or in shambles. Drive past their current residence and see how it looks, if possible find a reason to knock on their door and ask them something so that you can have a look inside.

Alright, back to the Star article. Later on, the writer balances his piece with a tenant advocate's side of the story:
Trouble is, the people don't disappear so easily into filing cabinets.

"What we do know is that the shelters are full of people," says Dan McIntyre, program co-ordinator for the Federation of Metro Tenants' Associations. "Some of them are actually on the street."

Indeed, an eviction, much like a bad credit rating, can haunt tenants for years, since most landlords research an applicant's rental history.

"If you mess around with your credit card and you don't pay it, you're going to get a very bad credit rating and you may not be able to borrow money to buy that new Ferrari," McIntyre says. "But that's it. You don't lose your home."

More handy landlord tips from The Star

Learn the rules of the renting game, Toronto Star, 26 Feb 2006
Applying for a rent increase above the guideline costs $500. That's just for the first unit, with a $5 charge for each other unit to a maximum of $1,000.

"It's not feasible for landlords with just one unit to apply for a rent increase," says Susan Wankiewicz, executive director of the Landlord's Self-Help Centre.

If landlording is basically a game, then what's the object of the game? Profitable investment, according to the body of the article, particularly by evicting tennants in arrears as soon as legally possible.

And hey, once your unit's vacant, you can hike the rent as high as you'd like without having to apply for the "unfeasible" regulated increase. Is this one of the vacancy decontrol game's unwritten rules?

Just last week the same columnist featured more kindly advice, urging landlords to go easy on first-time cheque-bouncers to avoid turning "good" tenants "bad."

I guess at the end of the day, the difference between good and bad tenants has more to do with the property owner's satisfaction with the size of the rent cheque than the tenant's ability to pay it like clockwork.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Tenants liable for too-old smoke detectors?

Smoke detectors soon to be mandatory in Ontario: RONA offers expert advice, Press Release, 23 Feb 2006
[A]s of March 1, 2006 it will be mandatory under the Ontario Fire Prevention Code for all dwellings to have a smoke detector installed on every floor...

Owners, landlords and tenants who do not respect the new law may be handed tickets up to $325 or fines of up to $25,000; smoke detectors more than 10 years old must be replaced.
As a tenant, the second-to-last thing I want (the very last being to meet with a fiery demise because of a faulty smoke detector) is to get stuck with a huge fine, but I'm not sure about the age of my smoke detector; maybe it's 10 years old, maybe not.

But property managers can take ages to get around to these things. Thankfully, Rona rides to the rescue by offering "up to 28% off on selected models." With a sweet deal like that, a new detector must cost way less than the possible fine. Sounds like the safest bet is to replace the smoke detector on my own, just in case, which I believe is part of the reason why Rona issued the misleading press release quoted above.

But wait, why should the onus be on me, to the extent that I'll be fined for my landlord's negligence? The truth is, it's not. In fact, tenants are not liable for old or missing smoke detectors: landlords are. As the Office of the Fire Marshall explains,
It is the responsibility of landlords to ensure their rental properties comply with the law.

If you are a tenant of a rental property and do not have the required number of smoke alarms, contact your landlord immediately. It is against the law for tenants to remove the batteries or tamper with the alarm in any way.
A Globe and Mail article written at the time the new rules were first proposed quotes Fire Marshall Bernard Moyle as saying,
there will be "zero tolerance" for tenants who disable smoke alarms and for landlords who allow maintenance of them to lapse. But firefighters won't be searching homes to ensure compliance, he said. "If we have to issue a ticket to a homeowner for a $10 smoke alarm, that's a failure... [t]his isn't about punishing people, it's about getting the message out."
So, it seems that while you may be fined for removing or disabling smoke detectors, landlords alone are responsible for furnishing a sufficient number of new smoke detectors to begin with.

Additional press: Pulse24.com, Beach-Riverdale Town Crier, Barrie Advance, Halton Herald, Fort Frances Times, City of Toronto.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Another year, another rent increase

Figure showing Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal Rent Increase Guidelines for 1998 to 2006 inclusive.
Source: Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal.

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.


Source: CANSIM II Series V227532.

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.

Monday, February 20, 2006

Human rights changes may aid tenants

Ontario overhauling human rights system, Employment Law Today, 20 Feb 2006
"We are pleased to see the government make these important changes to the system," said Kathy Laird, director of the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario. "They are long overdue. A human rights system that is able to promote greater tolerance and deal more effectively with human rights violations will ensure Ontarians are treated with dignity and respect."

Additional press: Toronto Star, Ontario Attorney General.

Good landlords produce good tenants

Finding — and keeping — good tenants, Toronto Star, 19 Feb 2006
Thomas Ho owns two condo units that he rents out. He thinks landlords should respect tenants and treat them as customers.

"Give them some leeway," he says. "I've had cases where the cheques bounced, but I didn't think anything of it. As soon as the tenants realized the cheque bounced, they contacted me and apologized and deposited the money in my bank account right away.

"I've also seen other landlords who freaked out the first time such a thing happened. This can turn a good tenant into a bad tenant."

Eviction applications up 10% in 2005

Eviction bids soar in Ontario, Toronto Star, 20 Feb 2006
Toronto landlords are seeking to evict tenants at a higher rate than ever before, and last year filed nearly 30,000 applications to kick people out of their homes, a tenants' group says.

The Federation of Metro Tenants' Associations said the 29,090 eviction applications filed by landlords here last year is a 10 per cent jump over the previous year, and the highest on record since Ontario implemented the Tenant Protection Act in 1998.

Across the province, more than half the tenants "were evicted without a hearing at the Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal," the association said in a statement.

No figures on actual evictions are available for Toronto...

No graphical figures were provided, either, so I produced a basic chart using Metro Tenants' data [1,2] to give readers a better sense of the upward trend.

Figure showing evictions per year for Toronto, Ontario outside Toronto, and All of Ontario

With my social scientist's hat on, I should add that to draw any firm conclusions about how shocking the 10% (and other, smaller) jumps are it will be necessary to determine if number of occupied rental housing units in each region rose or fell over time [3], and see if the growth in evictions kept pace with the number of rental housholds in the same period.

Additional press: National Post, LTV News, London Free Press, Ottawa Sun.