LEGAL BRIEFS

BY GARY STEIN, SOUTH OTTAWA COMMUNITY LEGAL SERVICES

ost readers know by now that we are in a rental housing crisis in Ottawa. We know it from all the personal stories of family and friends unable to find a place to live. We know it from the fact that every economic indicator was pointing this way for at least two years. We know it because it's finally making the newspapers. What we don't know is how bad it is going to get. I hate to rain on our local parade of great news about the economy but, when it comes to rental housing, I predict it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Here are the facts:

• Vacancy rates for rental housing in Ottawa have been falling quickly for three years. This year we hit all-time lows. Just finding an apartment to view is a major problem.
• The strong market for housing sales is leading small landlords to sell rental houses. The new owners then renovate and move in. Long-term tenants are forced out. It is all perfectly legal but the effect is that long established rental housing is disappearing in some neighbourhoods.
• According to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation statistics, rents in Ottawa rose faster than inflation between 1989 and 1998. Most tenants are paying a much larger proportion of their income on rent than a decade ago. In our current economic boom, rents for vacant units are skyrocketing. For many tenants it has become impossible to afford the rent if they have to move this year. With no new affordable housing being built, where do they go?
• Some landlords are evicting tenants using reasons rarely used in the past, so they can rent empty units at a much higher rent to new tenants. The law permits that. For example, some landlords are trying to evict tenants who have been persistently late with the rent. That was almost never an issue in past years. The results can betragic. Tenants who have often paid rent a few days late but still managed to pay every month, risk eviction.

Tenants should be defending against these evictions because they are winnable. Unfortunately, many people don't know that.

Tenants facing an eviction hearing at the Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal often do not know they must file a written "dispute" within five days of receiving notice of a hearing.

The Tribunal is issuing a vast number of default eviction orders where disputes are not filed. A recent project to contact tenants facing an eviction hearing has found that many people simply do not understand what to do. Many also reported not receiving the right documents from their landlords.

Tenant advocates are spreading the word about how the eviction process works, but people are still falling through the cracks. They are ending up unexpectedly thrown into the rental market at a time when close to nothing is available.

There has been zero construction of rent-subsidized housing since 1997. Waiting lists for city and provincially owned housing are years long.

Despite five years now of governments focussed on reducing taxes and government spending, private developers admit they still have no intention of building rental housing.

Two good questions: will private companies ever build low-cost rental housing? Or do the past five years show that it will never be profitable for the private sector to do so without government incentives? Developers have no more valid excuses in these boom times.

These trends are not going away. With governments adamant that they will not fund new housing and no new private construction being planned, Ottawa's economic upturn is coming down hard on tenants. The federal and provincial governments have abandoned tenants and offer no way out of an ever-deepening crisis.

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