Please sign to help stop rental corporations from requiring credit checks and co-signers from potential mature tenants in order to acquire a rental property. Also, I am looking for these corporations to stop requiring a "last month's rent" deposit in order to apply for a unit.

I live in Kingston, Ontario. Our housing market here is very competitive and several corporations such as Skyline, Homestead Land Holdings, and Springer Group hold the majority of available rental properties here, with Homestead cornering the market primarily. Homestead owns and manages 51 apartment buildings in this city alone.

Kingston is unique as well in the fact that we are home to 3 major post-secondary institutions (Queen's University, St. Lawrence College, and The Royal Military College of Canada). These educational institutions bring in several tens of thousands of students every year (in 2017, Queen's alone had an enrollment of 24,143 students), and many private landlords will rent bedrooms in a detached home for several hundreds of dollars a month solely to students for the upcoming school year. This has severely limited the number of available rentals in this city for hard-working taxpayers, and they are forced to apply for units in one of these rental conglomerates' properties.

With that in mind, rental prices in this city are outrageously overpriced as well. In a recent search for a rental property, the median price for a 2 bedroom apartment is between $1300-$1500 a month, plus utilities extra on top of rent. 

Homestead in particular requires you to submit a "last month's rent" deposit to even be considered for a rental. This causes undue financial hardship on those desperately looking for a home, as while their savings are tied up in the application process, they are unable to continue their search for a home as they are unable to pay any other prospective landlords should they be approved for another unit.

My fiance and I applied to a rental property owned by Homestead Land Holdings, and provided them with all required documentation, such as paystubs, proof of ID, references, and a glowing recommendation from our landlord. Additionally, we gave them a money order for $1234 to apply for the unit we were interested in. Several days went by and we heard nothing from Homestead in regards to our application. We both make good wages and can afford the rental costs and other living expenses easily. 

However, we learned from Homestead that we would be required to have a co-signer in order to be accepted for the lease agreement due to credit issues. Not only that, but they require the co-signer to earn at least $40,000 a year in order to be eligible!

My fiance and I are both in our early 40s, and his parents are deceased. My parents are retired pensioners with no revolving credit and are unable to sign for us due to this stipulation of $40,000 a year income. As stated earlier, we make very good money combined and can definitely afford the rent at the unit. With that said, we have also lived lives with various hardships and struggles, and admittedly, our credit issues are present, but not entirely unmanageable. I am actively attempting to repay my debts through a credit counseling program. My fiance's debt is more sizeable and will be paid down once mine is clear.

It is utterly ridiculous that these housing corporations such as Homestead require mature tenants such as myself and fiance, and countless others, to have a co-signer if they have past credit issues, but have a stable income and no evictions or rental issues on file. Many people are at an age where their situation is much like ours; parents deceased or retired, good income, but being denied rentals because of an arbitrary system of judgment called "credit". 

The crux of the matter as well is that students are given priority over mature tenants, as evidenced by the number of ads on Kijiji or Facebook Marketplace geared to that demographic. 

Personally, I know several hard-working folk who have been struggling to find a rental within their budget for years. One such has been forced to live with her parents in her 40s as she just cannot find a place to live on her own due to the impositions placed on her by the rental corporations, and the lack of affordable housing for anyone other than Kingston's growing student population.

I am hoping to garner some attention with this petition and bring light to this subject that many people have struggled with. I am hoping to incite change in the way that landlords and rental corporations are regulated, their requirements to apply for a rental and their ageist abuse of mature tenants who may have credit issues in the past, because who we are now is not who we were in the past.

Thank for you for reading this, and please do sign and leave a message to help me spread the word that this type of ageist discrimination is not acceptable. We need better housing options and we need them to be reasonable and accessible to all, not just a hand-picked selection of rotating tenants.

Have a lovely day!