Rocky Jones found a seat next to fellow activist Billy Lewis. Every chair in the room at the north branch library was full. People of different races, cultures and incomes sat with their neighbours, stood along the walls and spilled outside the door. Several young people in front of Jones held yellow signs. One read: “It takes a community to raise a child, not a condo.”
At issue was the fate of a former school the next block down. Last year, the city tried to sell St. Patrick’s-Alexandra and the nearly four acres of land it sits on to a developer who proposed residential high-rises. Three community groups took the city to court, and now the neighbourhood has another chance at the school.
When his turn came, Jones spoke into the microphone. North-end Halifax is one of the few truly integrated interracial communities in Canada, he said. “The cultural and racial harmony that existed is really being eroded and torn apart.”
Following the economic boom in our naval town after the Second World War, the north end blossomed. The main strip, Gottingen Street, held a bank, a theatre and a grocery store. However, in the post-war decline, families that could afford to leave flocked to the suburbs. Businesses followed them.
Between 1961 and 1971, the population of the Gottingen area dropped by almost half, and continued to shrink until the late 1990s. From 1960 to 2000, the number of retail and commercial services fell from 138 to 38. Vacant buildings, empty lots and social services replaced them.
But over the last 15 years the trend reversed. A Royal LePage survey of Canadian housing prices found the price of a detached bungalow in the north end has tripled—from $86,000 in 1998 to $275,000 in 2013. And according to the CMHC Rental Market Report, between 1997 and 2012, average rental rates in the north end have increased from $563 to $962.
It was a conscious decision to let the area disintegrate, Jones said into the microphone. Now developers are buying up property for nothing. People are insecure because they can no longer afford to live in the neighbourhood they grew up in.
“This is a chance for the community to stop that process of gentrification,” he said. People nodded as he spoke. When he sat down, the crowd applauded for 12 seconds.
• • •
How fast the north end is changing depends on who you ask. Developers say things are moving too slowly. Residents say they can’t keep up with the rapid, unfocused change. Meanwhile, the city doesn’t yet have a firm grip on the policy framework residents and developers agree is desperately needed.
The debate about north end gentrification has been burning for years. And it isn’t over.
Pointing at gravel lots, unrealized projects and a diverse mix of incomes in the north end, skeptics question whether the recent changes can really be considered gentrification. Some residents and businesses use the word “revitalization” instead, invoking images of newly renovated buildings and fresh coats of paint.
If you ask Dalhousie planning professor Jill Grant, there are signs of both gentrification and revitalization in the area.
By her definition, gentrification is characterized by a higher-income population moving into a neighbourhood, displacing lower-income residents. The ideology and cultural desires of higher-income people drive gentrification, she explained, and developers take advantage of that.
As it becomes increasingly desirable to live downtown as opposed to the suburbs, newer, more affluent residents are moving to the north end. There’s a cultural element too—the area is attractive because it’s artsy, quirky and diverse.
Realtors have caught on, marketing properties as “located in Halifax’s chic arts district.”
Businesses get it, too. Restaurants, retailers, an organic food store and a TV station have moved in, aided by the North End Business Association’s peeling away of the area’s stigma. Agricola is bustling and Gottingen is beginning to look like it did in the 1950s.
And, says Grant, HRM is making all of this possible. Through policy, the municipality is promoting density in the regional centre (the peninsula and parts of Dartmouth) and attempting to make land use more efficient in order to reduce the extension of services into the sprawling suburbs.
Economic, environmental and health arguments all bolster this policy; the city aims to save money, reduce emissions and encourage active transportation. But there are unintended consequences, Grant says: “Once you put in place the policies that encourage [density], then you’ve created the circumstances under which it’s possible for gentrification to occur.”
If social and economic drivers align with an enabling policy framework, it’s likely to spark gentrification, Grant says. Picture a forest drying from lack of rain. Then someone goes camping.
“Once it’s generated it has a way of going on its own like wildfire,” she says. “At some point it will be exhausted the same way a wildfire is.”
Jennifer Watts, councillor for the district that includes St. Pat’s-Alexandra, says the city doesn’t have a handle on north end development pressures. Development is happening project by project without looking at the big picture, she says.
“It’s not a free-for-all, there is still a planning process in place, but I think in terms of having engaged the broader community and understanding some of the pressing issues that people have, we haven’t had those conversations yet.”
When the shipbuilding contract was announced in 2011, HRM deduced it created a need for nearly 8,000 new residential units in its first decade. Presumably new workers would want to live close to the shipyard, Watts said, which has made the north end a particularly attractive neighbourhood for real estate and development.
HRM attempted to address these development pressures, Watts says. However, public criticism of spot zoning and lack of staff resources lead the city to step back and focus on HRM By Design.
Residents are concerned that by the time the Centre Plan—the third and final phase of HRM By Design—is finished, development may have outpaced the city’s ability to plan for it. Due to its “impetus of self-subsistence,” Grant predicts it will become increasingly difficult for HRM to limit gentrification.
However, she says, “One can’t demonize anybody in this process. “It’s a large issue and in many ways these processes happen and it’s very difficult to stop.”
• • •
Jalana Morton cooks with mousetraps on the countertops of her Uniacke Square apartment. The traps catch two to three mice each day. She had to move her three-year-old daughter into her five-year-old son’s room to escape the worst of the rodents.
Her doctor believes she’s allergic to the mice. When she empties the traps, she can’t breathe.
Morton requested a transfer, and produced a doctor’s note, but Metro Housing denied her request. Tenants must live in an apartment for two years before they can transfer. It will be another three months before Morton qualifies.
Mould forced Morton out of her last apartment. She desperately needs to move again, but her search for affordable housing in the north end has come up short.
“I’m facing housing adversity,” says Morton. “I can’t find affordable housing within the neighbourhood.”
The wait lists for public housing and co-ops are too long. Morton has logged long hours sifting through ads on Kijiji and calling rental properties. A support worker at Adsum House has been helping her look for a place to live, but the vast majority of apartments within Morton’s budget are in Dartmouth.
“It’s agonizing. It’s very hard. It’s stressful. There are many nights that I’m up crying.”
Morton feels she’s being pushed out of north end Halifax. “I can’t afford anything that’s within the downtown limits,” she says. “I feel like they’re just trying to build a bunch of condos and push the low-income people out so they can develop the area.”
Her son attends Joseph Howe School and her daughter’s daycare is also in the neighbourhood. She doesn’t want to move them again.
Morton is working at a temp agency and receives income assistance. She is going back to school this fall to work toward an industrial engineering technology degree so she can get a stable, higher-income job with health benefits for her kids.
Recently she found a co-op apartment on Barrington Street. She’s waiting to see whether it will work out. If not for public and co-op housing, says Morton, she couldn’t live in the north end. “In my situation now financially, I don’t think there would ever be a place here that would be affordable for myself and two small children,” she says.
It’s important to view the change in the north end as a process of displacement, not beautification, says Roberts Street Social Centre member Emily Davidson. When the centre was founded in 2005 in a north end living room, gentrification was already happening.
However, Davidson says, “we have for the entire time we’ve been occupying Roberts Street, noted how we are also players in gentrification.” Realtors and developers point to creative types and galleries as positive attributes of living in an arts district. The centre’s presence in the neighbourhood allows that narrative to continue.
And last year, the artists began feeling gentrification pressure themselves. It took the centre over a year to find a space in the north end for under $1,000 a month. The space they found at the corner of Creighton and Falkland is only temporary. They don’t have a lease. Their landlord has sold to a new owner who takes possession in February, 2014.
“They have been explicit that they want to evict the tenants and gut the building,” Davidson says of the new owner. In Vancouver, that’s called “renoviction.”
Rising rents have made it difficult both for the centre to stay in the neighbourhood, and for its members to find affordable housing. “In a very direct way, we feel that we’ve been priced out of this neighbourhood,” Davidson says. “We are both displacing and being displaced.”
If the Roberts Street Social Centre can’t find a new home, the artists will either have to reconfigure their programming, shack up with a like-minded group or move out of the area.
• • •
Condos may be a common theme of gentrification, but not every new north end development comes with a high price tag. In May 2012, Shelter Nova Scotia opened a new apartment building on Gottingen Street to provide supportive housing to men transitioning out of the Metro Turning Point shelter. And according to Shelter NS executive director Don Spicer, it’s already a success story.
Dubbed The Rebuilding after a naming contest with its new tenants (“we’re rebuilding our lives,” the winner said), the shelter’s 19 apartments have been full since it opened. “We have a very low vacancy in that basically there’s already people waiting to get in once someone goes out,” Spicer says.
In its first year, staff moved 100 men through Rebuilding apartments and into low-rent accommodations in Halifax, Dartmouth, Fairview and Spryfield. Eighty-eight percent of them have remained housed, says Spicer.
It doesn’t surprise Spicer that there was demand for The Rebuilding apartments. No, what surprises him is that even after one year and 100 people, both The Rebuilding and 80-bed Metro Turning Point are still operating at near capacity.
“Obviously there’s a lot of demand on that end of things where people that weren’t in the shelter before are finding a need to come to shelters,” he says. “Supply is still coming in at the other end. That indicates there’s a lot of work to do at all the different levels.”
The shelters aren’t alone. Vacancy rates at Uniacke Square and Mulgrave Park are less than one percent. The two north end public housing communities have wait lists of 54 and 71 applicants respectively. That’s a huge change from a few years ago, says Spicer.
Before working with Shelter Nova Scotia, Spicer was a beat cop and a Halifax Regional Police spokesperson. He has worked in the north end on and off for years. “In 2005, there was a waiting list to get out of there,” he said of Uniacke Square. The vacancy rate was 18 percent.
Spicer says there could be a few reasons for the dramatic increase in demand for housing in Uniacke Square. It could be that more people are having trouble finding housing, and it could also have something to do with a drop in violent crime.
In 2006, HRP set up a new police station in the middle of Uniacke Street. The next year, violent crime in the area was down 21 percent, and the vacancy rate went from 18 percent to zero.
The trend is encouraging from a crime perspective, Spicer says, but not from an affordable housing perspective. “I think it’s obvious that if costs continue to go up, and if the income of people who are experiencing homelessness doesn’t, then it’s going to be more difficult to find a place to live.”
The groups Spicer works with estimate that people coming out of shelter are spending upwards of 80 percent of their income on housing.
“You’re not going to find anything affordable at that rate,” he says.
According to the 2006 census, 27 percent of Halifax Needham households made under $20,000 a year. (The 2011 census results breaking down income by municipal or provincial regions haven’t yet been released.) That means, at the current average rental rate, these households would spend a minimum of 60 percent of their gross income on housing. Creating enough affordable housing will be key to maintaining a mixed-income north end as gentrification continues, says Grant.
“There will still be a mix [of incomes] in the north end as long as there’s public housing there,” she says. “If public housing starts to erode then I think the north end will likely tip into more affluent character.”
• • •
Across the street from The Rebuilding on Gottingen Street, a developer is attempting to fill two empty lots. Ross Cantwell of the non-profit Nova Scotia Housing Trust wants to erect two mid-rise buildings in which roughly 50 to 60 percent of the residential units would be market rate. The rest would be affordable to the “working poor.”
When developers talk about 30 percent of gross income in relation to affordable housing, Cantwell asks, “Well, what income level are we talking about?”
Cantwell isn’t targeting people experiencing homelessness. “We’re hoping to target people who are making 80 percent of the [neighbourhood’s] median income.”
That means, based on the Halifax Needham census for 2006, Cantwell’s target tenants make about $41,000 per family and $19,000 per individual. That’s a rent payment of $1,025 a month per family, or $475 per individual. “We’re really targeting the average working Joe,” Cantwell said.
Joe is the tenant who makes enough to qualify for an income subsidy from the province and can’t afford the rapidly increasing rents on the peninsula, says Cantwell. Joe is the single mom working 40 hours a week while paying for daycare.
“The people that are pouring you coffee,” says Cantwell. “Administrative assistants that work downtown. The cashier at Staples. These are people that are getting up, going to work every day, working hard. They might have one job, they might have a second job. Anyone who makes minimum wage. That’s the range that we’re looking at.”
Just under half the units would cater to this demographic. Tenants who qualify for rent-guaranteed income would pay rent with 30 percent of their income and the province would pay the rest. The housing trust intends to charge market rate tenants as much as possible to make up the difference.
But Cantwell has run into obstacles. Construction costs are rising while he waits for approval from the city. At eight and 10 storeys high, HRM says his buildings are too tall. However, Cantwell counters, he needs those extra floors to make the project economically viable.
The proposed developments have also generated flak from the surrounding community about the design and lack of three-bedroom units. As a single mother who is working hard to provide for her kids, Morton wants to know whether she would qualify to live in the housing trust’s proposed building.
At the moment, the plan includes only one- and two-bedroom units. Morton believes the neighbourhood is transforming into one that’s affordable for couples, but not single parents raising kids.
The provincial incentive to build an affordable housing unit is a flat rate of $25,000, no matter where you are or how large the apartment. “In downtown Halifax you’re going to pay $25,000 per unit, just for the land,” says Cantwell.
Morton says the province should provide a higher incentive so Cantwell and other developers can justify building affordable apartments for families. Her larger concern, though, is how higher-income and lower-income people will mingle in the area.
Already it feels like there are walls that cut the neighbourhood in half. Higher-income residents closer to downtown stick to the south end of Gottingen Street, and lower-income residents hang out closer to Uniacke Square.
At the St. Pat’s-Alexandra meeting, Rocky Jones told the crowd he believed integrated housing is the solution, rather than concentrating lower-income people in areas like Uniacke Square. “So now what do we have? We have a very insecure population who believe, as I do, that they’ve got a plan for Uniacke Square,” said Jones. “Uniacke Square is going. What we really need is we need a chance for multi-generational facilities where the grandchildren, children and parents all can live in an area together.”
The future of the school was one of the final issues Jones spoke out about before his death last week. “There is no excuse for not giving this property back to the community, because they will benefit economically, socially, politically and even spiritually with this facility,” Jones said, and sat down.
Proposed and recently completed developments in the north end
View North end developments in a larger map
Related Stories
Hoping to build up Gentrification: A Hip Hop Musical
This article appears in Aug 8-14, 2013.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA3oxE4X5w8
The province has plans for major construction of new housing units along the Gottingen Street corridor. HRM knows all about the plans.
I’m not sure I see the real problem. There are many places I cannot live as well, even though I don’t receive rent-geared-to-income subsidy. People who do receive this subsidy may be living in social housing, which targets rent at the necessary level, and this housing isn’t being redeveloped. The open market housing for people on low-income is tighter because it’s impossible to make money from building 100% low-income housing, and the Province doesn’t put enough money into subsidies for new stock/rents. There are, however places to go that may not be in the immediate neighbourhood. Services follow where patrons go.
If you can find housing elsewhere maybe the question is: what is the importance of neighbourhood identity and sense of place? Do people have rights to their neighbourhood? At what point is your neighbourhood YOURS and you then have more rights to it? Should people have the right to keeping their children in one school for the entirety of their schooling? What about landowners – should they have the rights to rent to the highest renter? How far is appropriate to have someone move to find housing? People of all income levels do this every day … look for something within their price range. If I were a longtime resident and homeowner on Creighton Street and I were to sell my home – should I be limited to selling it for less-than-market value to a landlord renting out to people on low income?
Still confused.
A beautiful city that people want to live in is a bad thing? Just because you grew up somewhere, doesn’t make the neighbourhood “yours”.
“It was a conscious decision to let the area disintegrate, Jones said into the microphone. Now developers are buying up property for nothing. People are insecure because they can no longer afford to live in the neighbourhood they grew up in.”
That sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory. Was he saying that development companies in the 1960s had a 50-year plan to let the area devalue and make a profit decades later, when some of them aren’t even around anymore?
I can’t afford to live in the neighbourhood that I grew up in either.
Only The Coast could find a problem with a neighbourhood regenerating.
Heaven forbid, people with actual jobs are moving back to the North End!
This has been captured in a documentary film entitled, “Pushed Out” by Fateh Ahmed. Thanks for covering this important issue!
Here is a link to the story: http://thechronicleherald.ca/artslife/1120…
What? Poor people don’t enjoy the same things as non-poor people? When and how did this happen?
Why didn’t the person profiled in this story pursue an education before having children and finding herself in this trap? It is a predictable cycle when children are born to parents who lack the means to support them.
No shit, eh? My decision to not have children was partially influenced by realistic expectations of my financial future. As well, I’d love to live ‘downtown’ but guess what….I can’t fucking afford it so I live off the Peninsula and bike 30 minutes to work in town everyday from the house I could fucking afford. If I worked my ass off through my life and ended up working in a big building downtown I’d feel pretty stupid if the people cleaning my toilets in the office building were my neighbors when I got home.
Yeah, a 50 year plan is coming to fruition for the developers. What a joke.
No disrespect to Rocky Jones, may he rest in peace, but the idea that the North End’s half-century decline was a “conscious decision” is absolutely ludicrous conspiracy mongering.
There’s no doubt that many property developers are more interested in fast cash than in community building, but the city’s business community did not collude on a decades-long plan to impoverish the neighbourhood and lower property values so that the next generation of business people could plunder the area. That does not happen, ever, anywhere. Even if they’d wanted to, they aren’t that far-sighted. It’s ridiculous, and such a statement exhibits a lack of understanding of the past half-century of urban living patterns.
The North End declined for the same reason inner-city communities declined across North America: the rise of the suburbs, and the existence of excessively concentrated low-income housing. Today, it’s gentrifying due to a similarly widespread middle-class trend back toward urban living. It’s no more complicated than that.
Filling in vacant lots and bringing more people onto the streets and into the community is a good thing. As this story notes, the North End has a much smaller population now than it did at its peak–there’s room for a lot more people there, and as long as there are activists working for inclusive development (rather than no development) I think the future is bright for the area as a mixed community with an inclusive bent, with room for rich and poor alike, and everyone in between. The North End is a special place with a special history, but it was middle-class before it was the ghetto, and it will be again. We should take a page from Vancouver’s book and look to including affordable housing in all or most new developments city-wide, rather than keeping one particular part of town as the poor neighbourhood.
pigeon – excellent post. Rocky was in his usual ‘blowhard’ mode where facts were never allowed to get in the way of a rant. The people would best be served by putting heat on Dexter, McNeil and Baillie to promise to build housing for all incomes as well as making St Pat’s into a community centre with the aid of HRM.
Now is the time to pin down provincial parties with explicit promises for the area including detailed community consultation.
http://www.halifax.ca/shapeyourcity/docume…
New assessment of the condition of St Pats – needs to be demolished because too expensive to renovate
” Considering the National Building, Fire and Electrical Codes governing today and the Municipal standards, the current condition of the property and the extensive amount of work to be performed to meet these standards, viability of this refit may not be conceivable or cost effective. It is estimated a cost of $ 9.0 million dollars would be required to meet the current standards plus the hazardous materials removal cost of $ 800,000 for the larger structure. “
” There is also an additional option HRM may want to consider. Decommission and demolition of both buildings on the property by HRM, sell the land after demolishing. Demolition cost including controlled substance removals, will range between 1.2 and 1.5 million depending on the extent of the hazmat materials encountered behind walls and within ceiling space not clearly visible today. “
Hilary Beaumont’s article is titled so as to suggest, incorrectly, that renters are not themselves amongst the ones pushing people out of a given location. Even before the advent of gentrification, as well as during gentrification, those who rent a given property keep other would-be renters of that property from doing so. And this is not limited to properties on the private market: public housing has more convenient versus less convenient locations, it has newer versus older units, and someone ends up occupying the better units at the expense of someone else. Thus, who ‘pushes out’ whom isn’t as straightforward as Ms. Beaumont insists. No matter how we finance our housing, we can’t all live in the same square mile.
No discussion about the North End can ignore the history that was Africville. While Africville cannot be other than a race issue, given who lived there, it is equally wrong to ignore the fact that the history of the displacement of Africville mirrors almost exactly, the history of the displacements of the very white neighbourhoods of east London and the English midlands during the postwar period of the late 1940s through early 1960s, right down to the kind of buildings built to replace those neighbourhoods. (Take a look at the ‘estate’ model in the UK, and how virtually all of the errors committed in the course of designing, building and populating those projects, were repeated in the project that replaced Africville.)
The model for the disaster of Halifax renewal that was the Africville affair was based on the merits of Tearing It All Down And Starting Over Again, which is not so different a philosophy from the one of today’s Occupy Movement. This should not really surprise anyone: the architects and planners in England were similar to the Occupiers and social activists of today: young, skilled, and idealistic, they truly believed they were going to build a world both newer and braver. It’s too easy to dismiss those past planners as having ulterior motives, to believe that they failed because their vision wasn’t pure. Yet their failure was more the one committed by your article, of ignoring what people actually do or don’t do, of ignoring what people actually want, in favour of what activists merely insist people do and want. Are residents who seek to sell their homes for the highest price possible, not expressing a valid opinion as to what direction they want their neighbourhood to take? What about residents who wish to limit the size of their families, why does this translate into a corresponding limit on the number or size of schools as being ‘wrong’? And given that limiting family size generally eases poverty as opposed to exacerbates it, are fewer schools really such a sign of a ‘damaged’ community?
It is just possible that what people do (or in the case of limited family size, don’t do) have a different opinion on gentrification from the one you insist they have. Those residents might just see having a tiny bit of Paradise Mountain after years of Poverty Hill, as something of an improvement.
I for one am very glad that the neighbourhood I grew up in and am lucky enough to still live in is a much safer, cleaner and better served and more populous area than it was when I was growing up in the 1970s.
What really irks me is the so-called activists who know nothing of the history of the area they perceive themselves to be championing. Does anyone actually think that the North End was better off as a quasi-industrial park?
How many of the North End condo developments are on reclaimed industrial land? Most of them. It’s not like many family homes are being demolished for condo projects, it’s that previously awful eyesores are being reclaimed. Corner of Cunard and Agricola? Dry cleaner and auto body shops. Corner of Robie and Cunard? Gas station. Gladstone ? Military heavy equipment storage. Creighton and Roberts? Screen-printing factory. Gottigen st? Burned-out vacant spaces. The list goes on and on.
I don’t LIKE condo development, most of them are hideous buildings with limited architectural vision, but I certainly think they are better for our community than what was there before in each of these examples. They increase the population, making it more viable to have small businesses in the area which really make it a better place to live. There are actually local small businesses here now too that aren’t just toxic industry, although some of those persists, despite the negative effects on liveability in the area. But I bet they too will eventually be “pushed out” to industrial parks where they, in my mind, belong, not next-door to families, either on social assistance, working poor, or more affluent.
With perceived property value comes a sense of civic responsibility that was sorely lacking for decades, manifested in how people care for public spaces and how they demand the city to do their part rather than just accepting the lot that’s given. Yes, I get that people were intimidated and shut-out of decision making, but now they are demanding to be heard. For example, the St. Pat’s Alexandra debacle. Would there have been so much resistance 25 years ago? I don’t think so, as I believe that North End residents have more of a sense of empowerment now, and as a whole, society is somewhat more inclusive that it used to be. Perfect? Obviously not, but tangibly better. That this debate is even happening is evidence.
I have empathy for people who’s economic situation makes it difficult to stay in the area that they have lived in, and there needs to be increased housing assistance and income-based housing options. Demographic and economic diversity is essential in creating a healthy community. But at the same time, I don’t believe in letting so-called housing activists’ opinions being over-represented just because their inflammatory rhetoric is attention grabbing and sparks debate by inciting class/ethnic/ownership arguments.
In closing, I want to rebuff the notion that hipsters are just now displacing “poor ethnic people.” (a term I despise.) I am a second-generation North End hipster who’s raising a family of third-generation North Enders. The simplistic notion that artsy-types have just shown up a ruined everything couldn’t be further from the truth. It was no working-class paradise, believe me.
Cranky has said it best without even saying anything.
2013, it is time to ‘get with the times’, take your blind folds off, and stop sitting on your butts pretending to yourselves that gentrification is a good thing. First of all many of you are operating under the false notion that there are only two options: 1 is to give in to gentrification and displacement, which you seem to think is ok (which is easy to do when your not the ones actually being displaced from the home you happen to love) or 2 to see the north end slip back into the industrial crime riddled area it used to be. What about options 3, 4, 5,6 and so on. There is a way, believe it or not, to beautify the north end in a way that doesn’t make it too expensive to live in for the people who grew up in it,stuck with it and have worked hard to make it a better place from the start. See below for more information http://www.urbancentre.utoronto.ca/pdfs/researchbulletins/CUCSRB31-NewmanWyly.pdf
We started this group to fight on behalf of all people living in Ontario and across Canada to pressure our politicians amend the Residential Tenancies Act to remove the provision allowing landlords to increase rent above guidelines and to reinstate proper rent controls to protect tenants from exploitive and predatory landlords.
A little background …
Our landlord, Hollyburn Properties, has been approved for over guideline increases five years out of the last ten. Adding approximately $200 +/- to our monthly rents over the course of 14 years. In some cases this has added a debt burden of $35,000 + to vulnerable renters in Ontario. This is happening all over Ontario (and Canada). Millions of dollars are being syphoned out of the pockets of hard working renters into the pocket of these powerhouse corporations.
The multi-million dollar owner of Hollyburn Properties has been approved for things such as mailboxes, lobby renovations, landscaping and many other unnecessary “upgrades” and the list goes on.
We are trying to organize a group in Ontario to pressure the Liberals to have this provision removed and to protect the people that put them in power.
Apartment building owners are some of the richest people in Canada and to expect tenants to fund renovations, with the approval of our government, is unconscionable.
We are trying to organize as many tenant associations/tenants that have been affected by this outdated provision, so that we are able to bring a strong voice to parliament that the direction they have been taking by allowing this extortion and outright abuse of the provisions currently afforded under the Residential Tenancies Act to be removed.
We are looking to add your voice to this movement to have the Act changed to protect tenants from predatory landlords that “upgrade” their buildings using money from provided by hard working tenants.
This provision should be replaced and a new provision that requires landlords to put 10% of their existing rental revenue into a reserve fund to pay for these capital expenditures. Tenants do not have a financial interest in the assets of these corporations and should not be required under the provision to fund them.
We are in the very early stages trying to gather as much support as we can and hope that you will add your voice to our cause. We don’t believe that this is the direction that society should be taking when so many are in jeopardy of losing their housing because of this practice.
We need as many stories from tenants as possible to provide us with the paperwork relating to these above-guideline increases. Please help spread the word to all people affected so we can have our voices heard.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1282837508474422/?hc_ref=NEWSFEED