Legal changes may help renters

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/09/2011 (5531 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I’ve been renting an apartment, run by a large corporation, for the past 16 years. In that time, the monthly rent has risen by close to 70%, which is way above what the annual provincial guidelines for rent increases are. In one notable year, the rent increase was around 8% instead of the 2% suggested by government.

These above-average increases usually led to many residents, including myself, writing letters of objection to the Rentalsman office. They rarely made any difference and rent increases stayed the same. A lot of tenants were also left feeling the deck was stacked against them, even though there is an appeal process.

Your building owner or operator has access to lawyers and accountants to argue their case. Average renters do not. As Kirkfield Park MLA Sharon Blady told me: “Tenants often felt it was like David trying to fight Goliath. There are many renters and many seniors in my area and I got a lot of complaints and concerns.”

One of my own objections was that some landlords — usually the larger, corporate ones — were getting around rent controls by embarking on major renovations, then justifying large rent increases to pay for them. Of course buildings have to be kept up, but my argument was that capital costs get written off against income anyway.

Capital improvements can be written off in a short time, the value of the property is then substantially increased, but the rent increases remain forever.

It looks a bit lopsided and not in favour of tenants. In my own case, one year the entire lobby, which was fine as far as I could see, was ripped out and a new one installed. Rents naturally rose above the guidelines.

This all left many tenants feeling powerless to stop the increases. In the case of some seniors on low, fixed incomes it may also have meant having to find another place to live, one more in line with their eroding incomes.

I have no objection to normal inflationary rent increases at all and most landlords are fair and reasonable.

But as Blady told me when I talked to her, the problem is often with unreasonable landlords, large ones, who see their property strictly as an investment rather than as a home for thousands of people who may not be able to keep up with ever-soaring rents.

Such owners may want to fatten up their bottom lines in profit, but tenants also have bottom lines and household budgets. Incomes may be fixed or barely rising at all.

Blady also agrees that many tenants felt impotent to do anything about it.

In July, Blady introduced new legislation  which at least begins to address these problems. She admits the law has to do a fine balancing act between the rights of tenants and landlords. After all, it is not a crime to own rental property or derive an income from it.

The new legislation allows for increased funding to low income tenants who have to access RentAid, a provincial program.

It also demands that landlords do more on a per-unit basis to improve major building items before they can seek a whole building rehabilitation.

Equally important, the law requires landlords to extend the recovery cost period of major capital expenditures by two years. Not allowing them to write it off in a shorter time means they will not be able to justify sudden and often shocking rent increases. The capital will be recovered over a longer period, so any increases should be gentler.

Blady says another major step forward with the new law is the establishing of an Independent Tenant Advisor Office to give tenants more power and access to the whole Rentalsman process.  This office will help them when they have to go through a hearing or dispute resolution process with the Residential Tenancies Branch or the Residential Tenancies Commission.

The advisor will help them fill out forms and appeals paperwork as well as prepare for hearings. The tenant advisor will also help tenants by speaking for them and presenting evidence at hearings if they have physical or mental problems, have trouble with English, or are on very limited incomes.

This is welcome news and gives a bit more firepower to David the Tenant in his ongoing battle with Landlord Goliath. The tenant advisor office will be located at 302-254 Edmonton St. and if you need help from there you can call 881-1714. You can also email them with problems at: tenant@legalaid.mb.ca
There are other important legal changes for tenants who need to break a lease agreement, which I’ll discuss in my next column.