Speakers Corner: From being homeless to becoming a landlord, one woman’s story

Today’s Speakers Corner takes us to Quinte West in Ontario where we meet Nicole Lewis, a woman who once had no place to live, is now a landlord and is using her voice and experience to help solve the housing crisis.

To say Nicole Lewis has come a long way, is an understatement.

“I left home at the age of 16,” she said. “Since then, I’ve been homeless numerous times — they were always different circumstances, but the road wasn’t easy.”

She spent 12 years either couch surfing, living in her truck or going in and out of shelters.

“It’s scary. You never have a sense of security.”

But by working several jobs — she still works three of them — she rose above it all. She now owns three properties, two of which she has rented out.

Given her experience as someone with unstable housing, she has empathy for her tenants.

“I’ve kept the rents low and I’ve never increased the rent,” she told us. “I’ve even bought tenants, going through a tough time, groceries. When they were late on rent, I would show up with food.”

But even with those good deeds, Lewis has been burned. Turns out, being a landlord has its own set of challenges. While she agrees there are bad landlords out there, she says she’s not one of them.

“As a landlord, everyone views us as this entity that is rich and is sleeping in money every night and that’s not true,” Lewis said. “As soon as you have a non-paying tenant, everything is back up in the air and you have the exact same feeling that I was talking about earlier.”

We spoke with Lewis inside one of the homes she once rented out. She’s had to remodel it several times after she says tenants, some of whom stopped paying, trashed it.

“The bathroom has to be completely gutted because the last tenant destroyed it, among other things that left this place unlivable.”

She and her partner do most of the work on their own but it’s not cheap and is taking a toll on their finances.

“I don’t want to sell this place, I was hoping it would be a rental to keep me going, but I now have no choice, I’m putting it on the market,” she told us. “We’re not wealthy, it’s a struggle and the rental market today is driving landlords like me out of the business.”

Lewis is now lending her experience on both sides of the fence — to Quinte West’s Community Safety and Well Being Plan.

“The goal of that program is to address the housing crisis in the city and address the mental health crisis here.”

It’s comprised of mental health professionals, advocates for the homeless and landlords like Lewis.

She believes everyone deserves a place to live — and fights for that — but is also speaking out on behalf of struggling landlords like her.

“In this house, in 2019, the basement tenant stopped paying rent completely and I waited over a year, without that income, for the eviction notice to go out,” she said. “I understand people have problems, they may be in between jobs or whatever but it doesn’t make sense for me, who has struggled to get out of the situation I was in, to go back to that position because someone else can’t pay their rent. The burden is falling on the landlords.”

Lewis puts a lot of the blame on Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant board. It oversees evictions for bad tenants and can help tenants with bad landlords. In Ontario, cases are backlogged and Lewis says it’s impacting everyone.

“The biggest thing the government can do is speed up the landlord tenant board wait times,” she said.

“This won’t only benefit landlords struggling with non-paying tenants. Right now, the vetting process for tenants is too hard. They have to get credit checks and jump through hoops in the hopes to maybe get a place to live. You have to be an angel just to get a home but that all started because there was no way to evict bad tenants. It’s the only tool landlords have now.”

Lewis believes unless something changes, landlords like her will be forced out.

“I can’t continue renting if I’m always worried whether tenants will or will not pay,” she said. “The less landlords like me in the market, the less inventory for people looking for a place to live. Until that changes, we won’t get anywhere.”

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