‘Stop the bleeding’: Residents urge Kitchener to push forward with renoviction bylaw

Committee members, city staff, and residents were split on Monday night as to whether or not a bylaw would help put an end to renovictions in Kitchener.

“Such a bylaw causes no harm, but it prevents harm,” said Randall Withell, a delegate at Monday’s Planning and Strategic Initiatives Committee meeting. “You have the legal and the moral authority to avoid discrimination, to demonstrate moral leadership, because we’re talking about human beings and not buildings.”

A renoviction takes place when a landlord evicts a tenant by claiming they will complete renovations, which range from complete overhauls to a simple paint job. The price of the unit will often increase, sometimes dramatically, when the landlord begins to search for a new tenant.

Renoviction bylaws have recently been implemented in London and Hamilton, but City of Kitchener staff claim that there isn’t enough evidence from those case studies to suggest that a similar bylaw would create a meaningful difference in Kitchener, and that the city isn’t currently equipped to implement the bylaw.

When it comes to the effectiveness of the bylaw currently in place in Hamilton, Jacquie Wells, chair of the Waterloo Region chapter of ACORN, claims that the statistics show that the bylaw is working.

“I just showed you that in Hamilton they’ve had a 99 per cent reduction in the number of N13s issued in the first five months, so even if they receive more in the remaining seven months, this is still a significant reduction,” said Wells.

Douglas Kwan, a lawyer who delegated at Monday’s committee meeting, explained that the residents being evicted aren’t the only victims of bad faith landlords, but that the market for affordable rental housing in Kitchener is also taking a nosedive in-part because of renovictions.

“We need to stop the bleeding,” said Kwan. “There’s so many affordable units being lost, there’s no additional funds from any level of government that could possibly replace those units being lost.”

Kwan claimed that for every unit of affordable housing built in Kitchener, 39 more are lost. That statistic is well above the statistics across the province of Ontario, where for every unit of affordable housing built, 15 are lost.

Kitchener Mayor Berry Vrbanovic motioned that the committee move forward with staff’s option that would explore how the framework for a renoviction bylaw would look and how much it would potentially cost.

Even in making that motion, Vrbanovic explained that he too believes that this aid for renters should be coming from provincial legislation.

“I’m not convinced that going with a bylaw is going to solve that problem, but on the other hand, I also have heard from many people who feel the bylaw is the sign of hope that they need, knowing that there’s risk associated with it,” said Vrbanovic.

“I do think that the right path here is for the province to take this on for all 444 municipalities in Ontario, and certainly, with or without this motion, that’s certainly something that myself and other mayors have been advocating for and will continue advocating for,” he added.

Committee members voted 6-3 in favour of directing staff to prepare the framework for a rental renovation license by-law. Council will consider the bylaw and the associated costs at an upcoming council meeting.