One of the signers to the auto-evict petition contacted CBC News about the auto-evict petition, which led to me giving an interview to a CBC news reporter and their TV crew last Friday (2024 03 15).
The article was posted on CBC News' website at 4:00 am this morning (2024 03 22).
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-landlords-eviction-petition-1.7151130
In my opinion, CBC's article is uncharacteristically -- for media in general, not CBC specifically -- balanced reporting. Unhappily though, it does not expand on the reason why I believe tens of thousands of rental units could become available near immediately, which added inventory might slow down the rate of residential rent rate increases.
So, here's why:
Small-to-medium housing providers are taking back their second suites, which are generally the most affordable rental units available, as well as selling their single-family rental homes and condos. Small-to-medium-sized housing providers are rightfully fearful that they could end up with a non-rent-paying, and/or property-damaging, tenant for a year or more.
No one wants to invest in a rental property when they could lose not only their life savings and retirement income but they could lose their own home, go bankrupt or even end up homeless. Stories like these abound on the Internet.
This fear explains why Ontario is the only province in 2023 that experienced a net loss of 6,548 rental units despite building 94,000 new homes.
If housing providers knew that a tenant could be evicted for non-payment of rent within 30 days, for example, then:
- Tens of thousands of second suite rental units could come on the market in just a few months because housing providers would know that their investment is protected by the law of the land;
- It would be significantly easier for a tenant to qualify for a tenancy since housing providers would no longer have a reason to be so particular and defensive in their qualification process;
- With the 41% drop in annual LTB applications, tenant LTB applications, which have also been stuck in the same delay queue, would be significantly expedited.
Tenants don't build rental housing. 95% of all the residential housing in Canada was built by the private sector. Government built the remaining 5%.
Literally half of that 95% are owned and operated by “unincorporated individuals,” meaning small-to-medium size housing providers, not companies.
Contrary to popular "political" belief, tenants don't outnumber housing providers by some extraordinary order of magnitude (e.g. 80 to 1). There are about 1.3 million tenants in Ontario and roughly 522,000 small-to-medium-sized housing providers -- not including large-scale operators. That's a ratio of 2.5 tenants for every small-to-medium-sized housing provider (again, not including large-scale operators).
The higher that ratio, the better it might be for politicians to get elected and for tenant advocates to get their agendas passed into law BUT it's actually worse for residential tenants. A higher ratio means there are less rental units from small landlords, which is the housing industry demographic that owns and operates most, if not all, the most affordable rental units, especially second suites.
It takes three to five years to bring each high-capacity housing project to the market. Then they struggle to find construction labour and affordable materials. Even then, rents must reflect the high cost of construction so new units are always more expensive than existing rentals.
While politicians ubiquitously ask themselves who will get me elected, the real question should be, where will my government's revenue come from, and perhaps more importantly, who's paying my salary? Tenants? A lot of that money comes from taxes and where does the bulk of that tax revenue come from?
Notwithstanding that, the bottom line is that the ONLY source of new housing that can meet the immediate demand of rental housing that is affordable (not to be confused with subsidized "affordable housing") in Ontario are small-to-medium housing providers who are willing to open their homes as well as buy houses and condos to rent out.
That will only happen if government guarantees to protect that investment, which it has catastrophically failed to do for many years.
Fix the LTB eviction process and many current issues will resolve themselves, (including especially extortionist fees for keys schemes) while new opportunities will flow from it.
CANADIAN APARTMENT MAGAZINE ARTICLE
In addition to the link to the CBC article, Canadian Apartment Magazine published a more detailed account of the auto-evict petition on the same day, which it titled, "30,000 Ontario landlords unite against failing LTB."
The article presents a much more detailed depiction of the reasoning behind the demand in the petition.
This is the link: https://www.reminetwork.com/articles/30000-ontario-landlords-unite-against-failing-ltb/v
The article also links to the actual petition.
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Please forward out the link to these articles, or forward this email, to everyone in the "landlording" community, but especially, forward it to your MPP.
There can be no peace without justice.
Chris.