Media and social network portrayals of tenant matters are often solely focused on the tenant’s right to housing and safety (for good reason) but these articles may gloss over the challenges landlords face in a market that is highly competitive and interconnected. In many of these commentaries, the contempt for homeowners and landlords is clearly evident. Sadly, other missives leave us landlords as the garden-variety bogeyman, never giving them the chance to be human. This perception needs to change.
Public sentiment has to shift from 100% pro-tenant, anti-landlord to 100% pro affordable and safe housing. After a shift like that, landlords are not demons, they are the facilitators of the very thing needed to claw out of this perpetual housing crisis we’re in.
On a recent Facebook post of a Toronto Star article, many comments from current or former landlords say the same message: Stop renting, sell your house and get out. I’m contemplating the same thing. After $20,000 in unpaid rent and $10,000 in malicious damages my deadbeat tenant has not only persistently abused and harassed me, he’s single-handedly destroyed my finances and put me in a position where, with rising interest rates, I may lose my home. Not even poverty could stop me from rising up to buy real estate, yet a tenant yields far more destructive powers.
How is it possible this could happen in a country like Canada? In a province like Ontario?
The common excuses relate to COVID backlogs and staffing shortages. But these excuses don’t reconcile with the burden of justice in a reasonable timeframe. If the institution you’re stuck using can’t provide hearings for non-paying tenant in 8 months, why not provide some other measure such as police powers after a tenant goes three months without paying? Why not consider non-payment as serious as locking a tenant out and let the Rental Housing Enforcement Unit work on it? In matters of rental housing, why is justice delayed so severely? Imagine all you ask for is a hearing within a month and you’re called “greedy” by the pubic?
Here’s the thing, as many as 50% of Ontario landlords are small privately owned outfits (these statistics can be hard to pin down). They may own one or two houses and have only the resources needed for personally maintaining the property. These landlords may have bought a house to plan for retirement or may have intended to pass the single-home investment to the family. It’s in this pocket of landlords that you’ll find the most reasonable and humane landlords. Don’t look to property management companies to give struggling tenant a chance. You certainly won’t see things like what I did for my tenant at the beginning of his lease: Free Internet for two months, the first utility bill paid, several pieces of furniture they could take if they wanted.
It’s true, a person’s right to housing is deserved in a humane manner. Helping a member of the community is always the right thing to do. But this humanity does not extend back to the landlord. As a landlord with a non-paying violent tenant, I wonder if the systems we depend on think I deserve any dignity at all. We have to change this ongoing and dangerous narrative and work together.
