Addressing renovictions in Bill 12

Government has introduced a Bill to address the growing problem with renovictions and compensating tenants who are evicted due to renovations, demolitions and manufactured home park closures.

Balancing the need to upgrade rental units and keep housing affordable in an environment where the market is out of control is a tremendous challenge.

Hearing the stories on Salt Spring and the other Southern Gulf Islands is heartbreaking and it magnifies the complexity of the task we have at hand.

Bill 12 is an initial step and I look forward to advancing the discussion with the Rental Housing Task Force in the coming months.

[Transcript]

Now it’s my turn. I was so eager, I was standing before the previous member spoke, so now I’m happy to take my spot here in the second reading debate on Bill 12, the Tenancy Statutes Amendment Act.

As I’ve said often, homes are at the centre of our community, and our homes should be places for people to live in, not only commodities to be bought and sold for profit. Yet in the last number of years, our real estate has become a place for speculators to park their capital and reap huge returns while British Columbians struggle to find a suitable place to live.

This has happened incredibly quickly. International surveys have shown that affordability in Vancouver has deteriorated more quickly than anywhere else in the world. Our housing crisis has a number of interconnected aspects affecting British Columbians across the income spectrum, and renters across B.C. have been hit particularly hard. Sky-high rents and near zero percent rental vacancy levels in several communities are forcing renters to contend with huge competition for units. They live in cramped accommodation and spend far too much of their income on rent.

They’ve also become vulnerable to renovictions, where they’re evicted by a landlord wanting to make renovations to their unit. Often, the unit then goes on the market for much, much more than it was being rented for. In the worst cases, renovations are used as an excuse for getting around rent controls to evict long-standing tenants.

Sometimes renovations are not done at all, or only minimal repairs are made while the price still increases dramatically. Other times, repairs are desperately needed for old buildings, but once the repairs are done, those units are no longer affordable to the people who use used to live in them. Renovictions exemplify the housing crisis affecting our cities and the disproportionate impact on low- and moderate-income people.

I’d like to just take an aside here for a second and talk about the impact — that I’ve seen this happen in very real terms in places like Saltspring Island. The member for Vancouver–West End and I were just having a conversation about the Rental Housing Task Force that I’m very happy to sit on with the member, highlighting the complexity of this challenge that we face and acknowledging the fact that the people on Saltspring, who we’ll be meeting with later this week….

It’s not just our cities that are feeling; it’s places like Saltspring Island, where there are complex housing needs. Complex bureaucratic and administrative rules on various levels of government have created a huge challenge on Saltspring, to the point where people who live in that community fear for the health and well-being, the sustainability, the resilience of the community that they know and love and that they were born and raised in or that they moved to and have become passionate advocates for.

It’s a massive challenge that is going to take a lot of work and a lot of effort to de-complexify the situation, really, and it’s work that I look forward to do. I just wanted to acknowledge the fact that I’ve heard in many, many meetings over the past number of months how the situation is deteriorating in communities such as Saltspring.

This bill increases notices of evictions for demolition or renovations from two months to four months. It also gives tenants 30 days to dispute an eviction notice for demolition, conversion or renovations instead of 15 days. This change will provide renters more time to find suitable accommodations and more time to challenge their notice.

Perhaps the most notable change in this bill is that compensation for bad-faith evictions will change from two months rent to 12 months rent. In bad-faith evictions, the landlord evicts a tenant but doesn’t follow through on their stated plans to renovate. Another example of a bad-faith eviction is when a landlord uses the vacate clause to evict a tenant, claiming that they plan to use the unit for personal use, but then they don’t follow through on those plans and instead re-rent that home to somebody else.

I’m hopeful that this penalty increase will be a real deterrent for landlords who are considering doing a bad-faith eviction to evict long-standing tenants and increase the rent.

This bill also gives tenants in multi-unit buildings who are being evicted because of renovation or repair the first right of refusal at the market rental rate. This change is an example of the complexity of the issue. Some tenants facing renovation may be able to take advantage of the first right of refusal at the market rate, and for them, I’m sure this is a welcome change.

This change provides some additional housing security for those who can afford to pay market rates, and it maintains the incentive for landlords to renovate older properties, some which are very much in need of repair. However, there is no doubt that this change does not go as far as many would have wanted, particularly those who have worked on the front lines with renters facing eviction.

Market rents in our city are usually far, far above what long-term tenants in these buildings have been paying. They may be hundreds of dollars a month more. Those facing renovictions may have difficulty securing an affordable and suitable place to live elsewhere. They may be forced to move out of their home, out of their cities, or they may be are forced into more precarious housing situations.

Indeed, many of the stories that I’ve heard in the Gulf Islands, and in Saltspring in particular…. There are some very precarious housing situations, and these are folks that are nurses, or they provide care for seniors, in-home care. They are living in precarious situations with their children, and the opportunities for them are very minimal.

We must do all we can to support renters in these situations, to provide security of tenure while also ensuring that necessary repairs take place. This is an issue that I’ll be canvassing further in the committee stage as well as in my work, which I referenced earlier, with the member for Vancouver–West End on the Rental Housing Task Force.

The second suite of changes that this bill makes are to the Manufactured Home Park Tenancy Act. I also have many manufactured home parks in my riding, Saanich North and the Islands. It shifts the compensation for closure of a mobile home park from 12 months to an amount prescribed by regulation. The government has stated that this new amount is $20,000. It also adds a new section providing compensation for a home that can’t be moved and prevents landlords from claiming disposal costs in certain situations.

The bill also authorizes the director to excuse landlords from paying these prescribed amounts if extenuating circumstances prevent them from accomplishing the stated purpose for ending the tenancy.

At committee stage, I’ll be canvassing these changes more thoroughly to understand the real change in compensation that people will be seeing from these changes. I also want to explore the rationale for preventing landlords from claiming disposal costs and the extenuating circumstances that may apply.

Overall, in some ways, this bill charts a middle path. It brings up the baseline of security while ensuring that buildings are upgraded — something that’s greatly needed. The number of renovictions we’re seeing today and the reason why people are being evicted for renovations is devastating. It is certainly contributing to the crisis that we’re in.

Nothing other than addressing the root crisis head on and ensuring that we responsibly address the housing crisis that we have in our province will do. We need to responsibly address housing prices before the bubble bursts. We need to increase the vacancy rate. We need to build more affordable rental housing that provides security of tenure. Nothing else will be enough.

I look forward to canvassing this bill in more detail at committee stage and working with the Rental Housing Task Force to improve and modernize our tenancy laws. I look forward to seeing this bill again at committee stage.