Need to know: Renting in a rooming house in Ontario

Shared accommodations are an affordable option for renters and rooming houses may offer a convenient solution for many looking to keep housing costs as low as possible.

Rooming houses are legal in Ontario, although some cities have designated zones where they are permitted.

However, tenants should be aware of how renting in a rooming house differs from having roommates or renting out an entire home.

The ‘rental unit’ in a rooming house

“A rooming house is a tenancy arrangement in which the rental unit — that means the living space in which the tenant is renting for exclusive possession — is the bedroom of a house where other tenants are also renting the other bedrooms,” explains Samuel Mason, staff lawyer at Parkdale Community Legal Services.

“And then everything else outside of that is common area.”

Common areas can include living areas, the kitchen, bathroom, laundry room, backyard and any other area shared with other tenants in the home.

“So that means [tenants] can’t really control it in the way that you’re able to control if you rent an entire apartment,” says Mason, adding that this is important when it comes to privacy.

Roommate vs. tenant

Tenants renting a bedroom in a rooming house are afforded all the rights and protections stipulated in the Residential Tenancies Act.

However, Mason cautions that tenants might find themselves without protection if the landlord lives in the home and they share a washroom and/or kitchen with them. The same is also true if a relative of the landlord is renting a room in the home.

“[In that case] you could be seen as a roommate of the owner, or a close family member of the owner. And so then all you have is the contract between you and that person. You don’t have the rights that are conferred to tenants by the Residential Tenancies Act,” he says.

That’s why Mason suggests that prospective rooming house tenants ask specific questions and find out exactly who else is living in the home.

“Are they close relatives of the landlord? — that being the landlord’s children, the landlord’s spouse, the landlord’s parents or the spouse’s children or the spouses parents,” he says.

“The rights conferred to you are much different if everyone living there is a tenant as opposed to being a roommate of the landlord or family members … it could mean that your tenancy isn’t protected by the governing legislation.”

Privacy in a rooming house

Mason says tenants have a right to complete privacy in their rental unit — which is the room they have leased. For common spaces, he says the issue of privacy can sometimes be a gray area.

Notice of entry

As per the Residential Tenancies Act, the landlord must give the tenant 24 hours notice before entering a rental unit, have a specific reason to do so and leave once the task is done.

“The notice of entry is for the rental unit. So if the rental unit is the whole apartment or the condo that you’re renting, it’s to enter the front door. But in a rooming house, the rental unit is the bedroom. So you only need the notice if the landlord wants to enter your bedroom,” he says.

As such, a landlord or their agents could potentially enter the home without any prior notice to tenants or specific reason, as long as they do not require entry into their individual rooms.

Camera surveillance

In general, landlords are allowed to install security cameras in public areas where tenants have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

“There have been cases in which landlords feel like the common areas that the tenants are sharing, they have a diminished right of privacy there,” says Mason.

“Some landlords do apply increased surveillance or policing of the common areas … like putting cameras up in the kitchen.”

If a camera is hidden from the tenants and they were unaware of its presence, Mason says he would consider that a “serious breach of landlord obligations.”

He argues that a tenant who is renting at a rooming house as opposed to an entire apartment or house should still have the same degree of privacy. Depending on how invasive the surveillance is, he believes the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) that oversees these issues could determine the same.

“I think they could find that the cameras or how they’re being used might be illegal. Meaning that it’s invading the privacy of tenants, or the legal term is ‘a substantial interference with the reasonable enjoyment of the rental unit and the complex,'” he says.

Receiving mail at a rooming house

Mason explains that tenants are not entitled to their own mailboxes in a rooming house as per the RTA.

Tenants usually share a mailbox and all mail for that address is delivered to that single box.

If a tenant finds that their mail was interfered with or goes missing, they should report it to the landlord.

The landlord is then required to investigate and could offer installing individualized mailboxes as a remedy for the issue.

Sale and eviction from a rooming house

If a rooming house is being sold and the purchaser would like to move in, all applicable LTB procedures need to be followed with regards to evictions notices and compensation and the standard rules apply, including the tenant’s right to await a hearing at the board.

Mason cautions that rooming houses tend to be more affordable for home buyers and the risk of being evicted for purchaser use could be elevated, especially in desirable areas.

“There is this phenomenon now of prospective homeowners who are buying rooming houses in the Parkdale neighborhood in Toronto generally, and seeking to convert those rooming houses into single family homes,” he says.

“Say you were living in an apartment building, you can be confident no one’s going to convert that into another kind of use — there’s somewhat more of a guarantee that where you’re living is going to stay that way. But in a rooming house now … there is a real risk that the home might be sold to someone else who wants to convert it … or move themselves in or renovate it in a way that the units disappear. So there is that risk that your unit might succumb to the forces of the market.”