By Fatima Baalbaki
When a real estate giant bought the building at 135 MacLaren St. two years ago and started converting vacant units into fancy executive suites, tenant Sandra Bender says she lived in a construction zone for the next 18 months.
“It was very disruptive,” she says. “Contractors were coming in at 6 a.m. every day working on the unit next to mine, leaving at 11 p.m.”
Bender was one of three panelists who were invited to share their housing-horror stories with more than 150 tenants during Ottawa’s first Tenants’ Conference, held at City Hall last Saturday.
Bender said she had no privacy because the landlord was entering her unit without permission when she wasn’t home. She had to keep her valuables locked up inside her apartment.
“On many days, I couldn’t breathe in the hallway because of the dust in the air from all the sanding,” Bender said. “The dust got so bad that you couldn’t see down the hallway.”
The new landlord began persuading the tenants to accept money to move out of their apartments to convert them into suites. The landlord also sent the tenants a notice of a 7.25-per-cent rent increase.
Converted bachelor units started to rent out for $1,600 and the one-bedroom units for $1,800, almost $1,000 more than what Bender and her neighbours were paying.
“I was really annoyed,” Bender said. “I started putting notes under people’s doors asking them to come to a meeting to form a tenant association.”
Bender and her neighbours took their landlord to the Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal and ended up with a 4.5-per-cent rent increase spread over two years.
Although she was not completely satisfied with the ruling, Bender told the conference she was proud they won the right to stay in their units.
The tenants’ conference was organized by local housing and community organizations with the help of the City of Ottawa. Participants received free breakfast, lunch, child daycare and bus tickets.
Organizers said the conference’s aim was to teach tenants about their rights and how to fight for them.
After hearing from panelists, tenants formed small groups and attended workshops on topics like eviction prevention and how to form tenant associations.
“We want to let them know that if they organize, they will be heard by landlords,” says Daniel Gagnon, of Community Legal Services, a legal aid clinic that provides free advice to low-income residents.
Inadequate affordable housing, intolerable living conditions, unlawful evictions and increasing rents were some of the issues that tenants discussed.
They also expressed the need for a national housing policy– Canada is the only G8 country without one.
Toronto City Coun. Michael Walker shared his city’s experience with tenant issues and some of the solutions and services it offers.
“Tenants are usually more stretched than any other sects of society in terms of survival,” he said, stressing the importance of organizing. “They should have people who advocate on their behalf.”
Toronto offers a range of tenant services, including a Tenant Defence Fund, which allocates $325,000 annually to tenant groups challenging landlords at tribunals.
The city has also developed a website to teach tenants how to file complaints and maintenance requests to their landlords.
What provoked a round of applause from Ottawa tenants is Toronto’s Apartment Standards website, on which the City of Toronto maintains a public record of by-law violations made by landlords over the past two years.
Rob MacDonald, a senior worker with Housing Help, assisted iwith the organization of the conference and says there are some things Ottawa can learn from Toronto.
“There’s so much we could be doing for tenants that we are not,” he says. “Ottawa needs to provide more tenant services, financial assistance, outreach to tenant organizations and even an apartment standards website.”
MacDonald says he anticipates a similar conference next year with workshops and information forums throughout the year based on the tenants’ needs.
He says he hopes the conference taught tenants that change is possible.
“I know a lot of people are angry, but I want them to think about ways to use that anger productively and to walk away with hope about what they can do to change things.”