Domicide 004: Renovictions, a preventable epidemic.

Domicide is a Toronto Compass original series of news stories and documentaries. Domicide is the murder of housing as a shelter and right. Instead, housing has been reborn as a financial asset, an investment for the rich to get richer at the cost of safety, dignity, and a human right.

We've spent the last couple of issues of Domicide introducing renovictions/demovictions, the act of a landlord evicting a tenant, often utilizing harassment and intimidation, on grounds of renovating or demolishing their unit. We've looked at what happens during a demoviction, and why. But now we turn to the question, can we stop them?

In 2022-2023 reno/demovictions (eviction served by N13 notices) went up 300%. That's three times as many when compared to five years before. 3 times as many residents are being forcefully removed from their hopes and are being usurped of their rights of compensation. Every single demoviction is the result of choices that have been made by those in power to allow developers and landlords (often the same) to have arbitrary autocratic power over tenants' lives, should they decide they want to redevelop or renovate. So what can be done?

For that, we leave Toronto, and head to New Westminster B.C, a city within the lower mainland Vancouver commuter area. An older area, it too fought a near viral spread of reno/demovictions. Seeing their people being forced out of their homes and thrown into a game of chicken with landlords, the city council voted to ban reno/demovictions. The act simply bans landlords from citing non-necessity renovictions as a reason to evict a tenant. Currently in Toronto and most places in Canada, if a landlord decides to make a 'major' renovation in a house, even without it being needed, they can evict the tenant on short notice and relist the unit post-renovation for a higher rent rate.

It should be no shock this is routinely abused. From claiming cosmetic changes meet the needs of 'major renovations' to outright lying about doing renovations landlords abuse this loophole in the system to relist units that are otherwise rent-protected.

Is the solution to avoiding this abuse, as simple as banning renovictions?

Yes. Objectively so. In previous years where 100+ had been renovicted/demovicted in New Westminster, after the ban that number fell to 0. And despite what landlords, investment groups, and conservative-aligned politicians argued, it did not negatively impact the city. Cash-flow investment in the city didn't cease, housing costs didn't shoot up and in fact, renters found themselves being able to safely and confidently stay in their rent-controlled units.

Within a couple of weeks, a wealthy fund that had bought a 21-unit building had tried to evict the tenants to renovate it and relist at a much higher cost than what the tenants were paying. The new act prevailed, and all 21 units and the dozens of tenants within them, got to remain. In a fortnight this act already saved dozens from being removed from their home and forced to find a new place to live after having lived in rent-controlled units for years.

Sometimes, it really is that simple.