Toronto renoviction report says ‘displacement is the primary objective’

A new report claims to confirm that evictions of tenants for the purpose of renovations — or renoviction — has less to do with refurbishing housing and more to do with hiking rent — something many Toronto tenants have long held as fact.

The report by housing advocate Philip Zigman and community legal worker Cole Webber is based on more than 160 buildings in Toronto where tenants have or are currently facing renoviction.

Zigman says interviews with tenants and public statements made by landlords make it clear that renovictions are simply a money grab.

“The same landlords who are proposing to completely gut and renovate a unit are completely neglecting the property until people move out or doing everything they can to evict tenants with other eviction notices, with other kinds of pressure, harassment, intimidation,” he says.

“It’s so obvious that this is not being done out of a sincere interest in improving the living conditions of existing tenants. Displacement is the primary objective so landlords could raise rents for new tenants.”

The report focuses firstly on the conditions that make renovictions possible.

“It is legal in Ontario for a landlord to evict a tenant to conduct extensive renovations … and lots of tenants are renovicted without landlords breaking any rules, breaking any eviction laws,” explains Zigman.

The root issue, he says, is the lack of any rules that prevent landlords from raising the rent for the next tenant after the previous one leaves.

“Unfortunately, as long as landlords are allowed to raise the rent in between tenants, they are going to be incentivized to push out long-term tenants in order to bring in new tenants. And renoviction is just one strategy that landlords use to do that,” Zigman says.

Secondly, the report details the experiences of tenants who have been facing coercion to vacate their apartments.

Zigman says tenants usually report feeling pressure to move out when a building is sold to new owners.

“Often what happens is the new landlord will approach people informally at first talk about a plan to renovate and it’s very clear early on that the new landlord’s plan does not involve the existing tenants. It’s not a collaborative effort — it’s ‘we’re going to renovate, you need to go,'” he says, adding that buyout offers are often made as an incentive to leave.

According to Zigman, tenants who don’t comply often see landlords begin to neglect their properties

“So they’ll fire superintendents, they’ll stop taking out the garbage, they’ll stop shovelling snow. They make it often impossible to get maintenance done. All of this is just to try to have conditions at the building deteriorate so that people get frustrated and move out,” he says.

Tenants have also reported getting repeated notices for non-payment of rent or non-compliance with apartment rules.

“Then if tenants still stay, we see landlords escalate the pressure. They might start harassing people with phone calls or texts, asking them when they’re going to accept the buyouts. One thing we see often is frequent unit inspections. And then eventually they could escalate by seeking eviction through the landlord and tenant board, which tries to have tenants removed through the legal process and eventually a sheriff,” says Zigman.

But tenants have been fighting back, says Zigman, and the report documents that it is becoming an important countermeasure.

“Unfortunately, even though landlords are saying [publicly] ‘we’re doing this to make money, we’re doing this because it’s incredibly profitable’ … it remains legal for them to do it. So tenants reasonably have opted to organize together and try to put pressure on their landlords outside of the legal process rather than rely on a process that sanctions dispossession,” he says.

“There are tenants in buildings across the city that over the past few years have successfully fought back and … their landlords withdrew the evictions before they went to the landlord and tenant board.”

For example, several tenants in one Lawrence West building are banding together to put up a fight against the new owners of their building, who have made their intentions to renovate and re-rent at higher rates amply clear.

“We know for a fact because we saw the advertising, it’s all over the internet and everything — these apartments when it’s renovated, the one-bedroom would be a thousand dollars more. The two bedroom and three bedroom, it’s like almost double the rent,” says ground floor tenant Debbie.

“I think that is the whole purpose of wanting to evict us so that they could just do the little renovations and make double the amount of money.”

Several tenants on their floor have moved out already she says, but Debbie and her husband have no intention of moving out of their home of eight years.

“We formed a group and we started to have meetings and so on to decide what we would like to do or what we can do. We had rallies in the summertime and then we had neighbourhood walks where they printed out pamphlets with all of the information and what the landlords were doing and we went and got the people sensitized about the situation,” she said.

Thus far, the landlord has refused to meet with them. Debbie says she will not allow any renovation crews into her home and hopes their resistance will compel the landlord to withdraw eviction notices sent to tenants.

Abra Shiner, a tenant in a Queen West building who CityNews spoke to around two months ago, also continues to fight renoviction from her home of over two decades.

She is battling terminal cancer and a community petition to urge her new landlords to withdraw her eviction notice garnered over 32,000 signatures in February.

Since then, she says she opened a file with Toronto Licensing and Standards to get the landlords to make some necessary repairs that had been neglected. Apart from that, the situation seemed to have calmed down.

“They did a little bit of work. No one really said much and in that time my health was stable and everything seemed fine. And then about a couple of weeks ago … it all happened at once. My scans came back showing growth in my cancer and at the same time, the landlords put an application to amend the zoning bylaw up in the window downstairs,” she says.

Abra explains that the plans for the building include turning four low-income housing units into three luxury apartments as well as adding a second retail space to the ground floor.

“It’s incredible how many of my neighbours have been renovicted and then the apartments, after undergoing minor renovations, then just sit empty because no one can afford them. The apartments next door, which were also renovated into luxury units, are empty. The shop downstairs next door is empty … it’s just really not what our community or our city needs,” she says.

She’s been continuing her efforts to hold mediation meetings with the new landlords to explain her situation and why it is impossible for her to move.

“I don’t think I would survive a move. It’s a lot of stress and there’s nowhere that I could go within my budget that would keep me close to the hospital where I’m starting radiation, hopefully, this week,” she says.

Abra’s hearing at the Landlord Tenant Board is coming up in June but she hopes she’ll be able to convince her landlord to withdraw the eviction notice before then.

Ontario beefs up tenant protections

Meanwhile, Ontario recently proposed new protections against renovictions. 

They include requiring landlords to give tenants a report from a qualified person stating that the unit must be vacant to allow renovations to take place. Landlords would also be required to give tenants a 60-day grace period to move back in once renovations are complete at the same rent they were paying before.

Housing minister Steve Clark also said Wednesday that he is proposing changes to double the maximum fines for offences under the Residential Tenancies Act to $100,000 for individuals and to $500,000 for corporations.

In addition, 40 additional adjudicators and five office staffers will be appointed to the Landlord and Tenant Board so that it can operate more efficiently and reduce the backlog.

Zignman says the measures are unlikely to be effective as they “do not fundamentally change the existing requirements on landlords or the legal process for evicting tenants for extensive renovations.”

“They do not change the conditions that make renoviction possible and profitable.”

Read the full renovictions report: