Ioanna Roumeliotis, CBC: So your message to landlords then is “suck it up.”
Geordie Dent: My message to landlords is, “Welcome to what tenants have been living with for the last two decades.”
Tenants are just using this newfound power they have to just get a few crumbs from landlords.
Text on screen: Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board rules on disputes between landlords and tenants.
With a backlog of cases, it can take months or years for one to be heard—giving tenants leverage amidst an affordability crisis.
Roumeliotis: Dent says more people than ever are struggling to pay skyrocketing rents and are fed up.
Call it renters revenge.
On online forums, tenants encourage each other to get as much as they can from their landlords before handing over their keys.
Text on screen: When landlords use their legal rights to massively hike rents, establishment media treat it as normal.
But when tenants use their right to get compensation for giving up tenancy, it’s treated like “extortion.”
Roumeliotis: Some people are asking for six figures.
Dent: Great.
Roumeliotis: Others are asking for a plot of land or a down payment on a house.
Dent: I think that’s wonderful.
Roumeliotis: Why do you think that’s wonderful?
Dent: Because they have the right to do that.
Look, a lot of these people, myself included, are paying tens of thousands of dollars for a place to live and a place to rent.
When you pay that money, it doesn’t just go into the ether, you get rights for that.
Now, landlords have been using their rights to get a good deal for decades, through the entire rental crisis that we’re going through. Landlords have been opening the caviar and popping the champagne.
Roumeliotis: Dent says eviction fraud is the number one complaint his group deals with. Tenants, he says, are often pushed out so landlords can jack up the rent or sell and make a profit.
Text on screen: The Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations estimates that 40,000 tenants are fraudulently evicted by landlords in Ontario every year.
Roumeliotis: What do you say to the landlords who basically saved up their money to buy a property and who now might lose that property?
We’re not talking about millionaires.
What do you say to the mom-and-pop landlords who are suffering as a result of this?
Dent: I tell them to learn about investment risk. Okay, I don’t really focus on the individual “mom and pop” landlords. I look at the overall market.
Text on screen: Since 1995, investors—not mom-and-pop landlords—have bought up 65 per cent of rental units in Ontario.
Dent: If you look at the overall market today, landlords have never had it better. It is a golden age of profit, increased equities in their home, tax cuts, and tax credits. They are living large.
If you take a look at the tenant population, tenants are getting absolutely hammered. They’re paying exorbitant rents, they’re getting evicted, left, right and centre, they can’t enforce their rights.
Roumeliotis: So your message to landlords then is: “suck it up.” That’s the risk that comes with an investment.
Dent: My message to landlords is, “Welcome to what tenants have been living with for the last two decades.”
So yes, when a landlord has to struggle who’s in far better condition than almost any tenant?
Yeah, I’m going to tell them to “suck it up.”
“We need media that enlarges the sense of what’s possible.”
Naomi Klein, journalist and author
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5 comments
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Who does one complain to? My landlord wanted to evict me because his defective old hot water tank finally bit the dust and I was without for 10 days… not the only thing that broke after I moved in. But he faithfully raised my rent every year though!
Sounds like a neutral body is needed to sort this out.
Important to both sides – but especially to tenants, who need a place to live that they can afford!
Setting up confrontational situations between landlord and tenant is more than likely to make the situation of renters worse than it already is without this conflict. There needs to be a non-partisan, non-confrontational approach to set up the relationship between tenant and landlord that works for both parties. I saw no attempt at all to accomplish this in this piece or the CBC documentary. Confrontations sell for most media, obviously including the Breach. Too bad one could have hoped for a more enlightened alternative.
Geordie’s view is so short sited and doesn’t realize how awful it’s going to end up being when no one but huge corporations can afford to buy property. Then basically you end up paying a fee for everything, getting outrageous increases every year. But go on encourage bad tenant behavior. Geordie Dent is a clown.
Why do you think landlords have upped the rents so drastically? I’ll tell you why, because mortgage rates are through the roof, the debt to income ratio and stress tests are making it harder and harder to qualify for a mortgage! And if the bank knows it’s a rental unit they will only allow 50% of the rent to be used to qualify for the mortgage. Add to that, the cost of repairs, insurance, legal fees etc. when trying to evict a tenant or even get them to pay their rent and the landlord could go broke! No wonder rents are through the roof! Until something is done to protect the landlords right to protect their property and income from that property I imagine you will continue to see rents reflect the risks associated with renting.
Imagine if you invested mo et with in a pension fund or or other investment and they just refused to pay you your interest or return on your investment… they would be charged with fraud!