Landlords, like tenants, each have their own temperaments, faults, and stresses. Overall, tenants and landlords also have good qualities and a desire to prosper for themselves and their families. That said, I would like to tell you about one landlord I have known for over 30 years. It is a Mom and Pop-type property management arrangement, with his two sons working at their own careers, attending school and giving up every weekend to cut grass, trim hedges, shovel snow, fix a leaking faucet, clean apartments for an incoming tenant, show apartments, vacuum hallways, drive to Home Depot, carry a broken-down fridge or stove down a flight or two of stairs, get up in the middle of the night because someone has locked themselves out, or they are notified that the fire alarm has gone off because a tenant came home from shift work, had a few drinks and fell asleep with a pot cooking on the stove – again. The list continues and landlords accept these jobs as part of the general maintenance for which they are responsible. Yes, they also get to make a deposit once a month, or more, as tenants are able to pay, God willing.
This landlord, through the years, has been there for so many tenants when their families weren’t. What follows doesn’t fit the stereotype of the greedy and uncaring property owner. Mr. X noticed that an elderly tenant, who had a problem with alcohol and gambling, and often had to be chased for the rent, had barely anything in his fridge. So, the landlord often picked him up some bread and a BBQ chicken to make sure he had some food. The man was a bit of a hoarder dragging home things and eventually a bed bug problem developed in his apartment. The tenant’s mind was deteriorating too.
The landlord paid for Meals on Wheels for a few months until a social worker could get him placed in a care facility. When the elderly man’s nephew was contacted in western Canada, as his next of kin, the reply was he wanted nothing to do with his uncle as he was always borrowing money from the guy’s mother to fund his bad habits. While in the care facility, the man walked a very long way back to his old basement apartment and once crawled through the basement window to be back “home.” The landlord’s son did not call police, but got him into his father’s van, bed bug-infested clothing and all and returned him to the care facility. Twice this landlord had the difficult task to tell parents that he found their son had died in their apartments by overdose.
The landlord’s son found another elderly tenant lying on the floor, naked and shivering. It appeared she had gotten out of the shower, but we never knew how many days ago. He covered her and held her, while phoning 911. The nephew’s wife phoned the next day to say the tenant had passed away in a diabetic coma. The landlord has often moved female tenants with his van who were only moving a few blocks away. One of his sons was called once a month for several years to take another older tenant to pick up a case or two of water. He did it, though annoyed.
The landlord’s wife phoned over 500 people in B.C. with the same last name as a middle-aged tenant who was hospitalized suddenly with brain cancer to find a next of kin. She failed to find anyone, and the tenant died alone. The one person she had listed as next-of-kin was a friend and he stayed at arms-length. Her body and estate have been in the care of government authorities for almost a year. It is quite unclear whether the landlord will ever see 6 months of rent owed to him. Prior to becoming comatose, the tenant would phone him at 1 am from the hospital, not making any sense, but it was him that she reached out to. He has given $100 to two sets of parents for each of their newborns now living in the building. His son is now the contact, after 911, on another tenant’s medical alert bracelet who has developed Alzheimer’s. A tenant in her nineties, who the landlord particularly had fun with, did laundry every day. He would play a game with her. If she could guess which hand, he had coins in, she would get her laundry free.
He was asked by the visiting mother of a tenant to pick up a prescription for her while he was in Europe on vacation, which he travelled a little out of his way to do. At 82, he climbed up on a tenant’s step stool to change her light bulb more than once. She is a third his age. Eventually, he gave her a supply of lightbulbs and she now knows how to do it! His sons each helped a tenant, who was not computer-literate, to re-boot or how to retrieve her email again and again; the same tenant who demanded cash for keys to leave (and got it due to the delay – pre-COVID-19 – at the LTB and the uncertainty whether he would indeed succeed in getting an Order for eviction and damages) when she became disruptive to others and caused flood damage to her own and two apartments beneath her. Certainly, he has been to the LTB several times over 30 years, but then again, he also has a tenant who likes to bake and gives fresh baked treats to him and his family. So, it works both ways, tenants and landlords are often depicted as one-dimensional – and they are not, not at all.
