Renters rally to protect rights against unfair evictions

Renters rally to protect rights against unfair evictions

By Kelly Sinoski, Vancouver Sun May 7, 2011

NDP MLA Spencer Chandra Herbert joins Vancouver tenants to stand up to landlords trying to evict long-term renters from a Kitsilano-Point Grey apartment complex and to call for stronger eviction protection laws in Vancouver, BC., May 7, 2011. Daved Eby (l) with Tim and Amy Bratton on the right. David Eby, NDP candidate in the provincial byelection in the Point Grey constituency, is in the background to the left of Chandra Herbert.  Photograph by: Nick Procaylo, PNG

VANCOUVER – For five years, Amy Bratton never had any trouble with the landlords of her Kitsilano suite. They even knocked money off her rent when she took care and maintained the seven-unit building.

But that all changed eight months ago when the landlords decided to sell the stucco-covered house-turned-apartment building at the corner of Balsam and 3rd Avenue to new owners.

Now Bratton and her husband Tim say they are facing a so-called “renoviction” — a tactic in which landlords attempt to kick out renters under the guise of renovating the suites before substantially raising the rents.

The trend, which began in the West End 2007, is spreading across the region as landlords use tactics such as not replacing lights and increasing laundry costs, to force long-term tenants out.

Within days of taking ownership last December, the new landlords in the Bratton’s building renovated an empty suite and raised the rent from $750 to $1,075 — the same amount the Brattons pay for their one-bedroom suite. “It’s been a real source of frustration,” Tim Bratton said. “This is a place we have made our first home in … we feel powerless to do anything about it. The current law does not provide enough protection for us as tenants.”

The Brattons were among about 30 people — including NDP MLA Spencer Chandra Herbert and Vancouver-Point Grey byelection candidate David Eby — who rallied in the rain outside their apartment building Saturday to raise awareness of their plight and call for the Liberal government to impose stronger eviction protection laws to balance the rights of both landlords and tenants.

Many carried placards reading: Eviction: Are you next? and No tenant in B.C. safe from renoviction.

“I’ve seen this story play out again and again across B.C.,” said Herbert, who has introduced new legislation aimed at prohibiting landlords from using the tactics. “The vast majority of landlords are good. They work with residents. They don’t attempt to kick people out so they can jack up the rents.”

Herbert noted in some cases, the renovation only involves a fresh coat of paint and new cabinets yet the rent is inflated by 73 per cent.

The renoviction situation first arose in Vancouver’s West End, where residents continue to fight against what they say is a legal loophole in the Residential Tenancy Act that allows for such evictions.

Many of the people at Saturday’s rally were survivors of other apartments where renovation notices had been served.

The residents want changes to Section 49 (6) (b), of the act. It says a landlord may end a tenancy if the landlord has all the necessary permits and intends in good faith, to renovate or repair the rental unit in a manner that requires the rental unit to be vacant.

More than 50 buildings have been tracked for renovictions in the past few years, according to Sharon Isaak, of Renters at Risk, who is still at her West End apartment after fighting her own eviction notice in the courts.

But Isaak noted that many tenants tend to give in because they don’t have the time, money or energy to fight the eviction notices, especially once the landlord starts withholding services or ripping up carpets, making their home seem uninhabitable.

“Tenants don’t want to go public about it; it’s too stressful,” she said. “It wasn’t that widespread before but now more people are doing it.”

Eby, who is running against Premier Christy Clark for the Vancouver-Point Grey seat in a byelection Wednesday, promised to work with tenants and stand up for renters.

Bratton, who has lived in the suite for five years — and the last eight months with Tim after they got married — said the landlords have given them a smaller storage space with no electrical lighting and have not replaced the light bulbs at the front and back of the building.

“It’s been stressful,” she said.

Added Tim: “This has shown us how vulnerable we are as renters. You don’t know when a landlord can come in and push you around. We have the resources to move and relocate but we know a lot of people who can’t.”

Renoviction Ruline Highlights Inconsistencies in RTB decisions

Renoviction Ruling Highlights Inconsistencies in RTB decisions

Published in the Westender

03/02/2011 12:00 AM

Mark Moore says the Residential Tenancy office is shrouded in secrecy and stacked against renters. Credit: Jessica Barrett

Mark Moore, Christine Brandt and Andrew Simmons stood outside the West End’s Seafield Apartments on a bitingly cold Wednesday morning trading war stories.

The trio had turned out to support 15 of the building’s tenants who last week learned they’d successfully fought mass evictions by their landlords, Gordon Nelson Investments Inc. But as the press conference dissipated, the three neighbours lingered to recount their own David-and-Goliath battles against landlords who’ve been attempting to evict entire buildings in the West End.

The Seafielders may have won this time, but the way these neighbours see it, the victory highlights serious inconsistencies in rulings by dispute resolution officers with the Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB) and an overall lack of transparency in the bureaucratic framework intended to protect renters’ rights.

“Really, it’s not a very transparent system at all,” says Simmons, a resident at nearby Emerald Terrace, who has successfully fought eviction by landlord Hollyburn Properties.

“No it’s not, there’s no sunshine, which is really antithetical to a democracy,” replies Brandt, joined by her partner Moore. After leading the fight against evictions in the building, the couple and their young son were evicted from the Seafield in mid-October after a dispute resolution officer (DRO) rejected their argument the order to vacate their two-bedroom suite to make way for a live-in property manager had been made in bad faith.

Moore says the experience was the last straw in dealing with a system that, in his opinion, seems shrouded in secrecy and stacked against renters. “We don’t know who these people are, we don’t know how they get their jobs, we don’t even know what their first names are because  they’ll only give you an initial,” says Moore of the DROs in charge of hearings at the RTB.

A look at decisions posted by the provincial agency illustrates his point. Want to find out if a certain landlord or tenant has a habit of showing up in dispute resolution hearings? Tough. Decisions published on the RTB site have been scrubbed of all identifying details of the parties involved. Wondering whether a certain DRO has a tendency to side with landlords over tenants, or vice versa? No dice. There won’t be any details on the individuals deciding the case, either.

According to a spokesperson for the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General, qualifications for DROs include “experience in binding and legal decision-making in an administrative law setting,” but publicly released decisions by the RTB are stripped of identifying details in order to protect the privacy of participants.

“All decisions are published and universally accessible, however identifying information is removed from them,” the spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to WE. The e-mail also explained “the RTB has the same jurisdiction as the Provincial Court, and the decisions belong to the participants.”

But while decisions released by provincial courts and virtually every other quasi-judicial body in B.C., such as the BC Human Rights Tribunal or the Employment Standards Tribunal, clearly state identities of arbitrators and disputing parties in most cases, the RTB is exempt.

For renters like Simmons of Emerald Terrace, that practice seems engineered to keep renters in the dark about landlords’ track records. “So you can look at 10, 20, 30 decisions online and not know that it’s 30 decisions in a row against the same landlords,” he says.

Lawyer Scott Bernstein with PIVOT Legal Society, agrees the practice is dubious and unique among legislative tribunals in the province.

“I think it really speaks ill for accountability of dispute resolution officers and the Residential Tenancy Branch as a whole,” he told WE in a phone interview. “When you choose to litigate something in the courts, you have to make a special application for having your name taken off the header… I think maybe it should be the same way.”

Having information of the parties and arbitrators publicly available would help renters identify pattern behaviours, Bernstein continued.

“It would reveal systemic issues of how landlords treat their tenants and take care of the buildings and so on.” PIVOT currently has a mandate to conduct legal outreach on renters’ issues, he added.

Whether landlords’ records should be taken into account in dispute resolution hearings is another issue facing renters. Bernstein stopped short of saying DROs should be compelled to take previous decisions against landlords or tenants into account in dispute hearings, but there should be more consistency in rulings by the RTB.

“If your neighbour got one kind of a ruling from one dispute resolution officer and you bring in the same facts and the same situation against the same landlord, you should have the same ruling,” he said.

For many West End residents that has not been the case. Sharon Isaak of the non-profit group Renters at Risk cites her experience in 2006 when landlord Hollyburn Properties were evicting residents, floor-by-floor, from Bay Towers to conduct renovations.

“We had mixed decisions coming out of the RTO. I won, and then every other floor lost and the arguments and the evidence were identical,” she said. “It was this storm of mixed decisions coming out… it was this whole mentality of divide and conquer.”

Former Seafielders Moore and Brandt are still dismayed by their unsuccessful dispute hearing last October. A copy of the decision in their case supplied by the tenants shows the DRO, identified only as D. Bryant, refused to allow them to present previous tenants as supporting witnesses. Nor did he take the landlords’ prior behaviour in evicting previous tenants, or their unsuccessful bid for a 73-per-cent rent increase, into account. However the past behaviour of Gordon Nelson Investments figured prominently in the most recent decision by one D. Vaughn, another DRO, who ruled in favour of the remaining Seafield tenants who’d claimed their eviction notices had been issued in bad faith.

“They’re given a lot of latitude what evidence to accept,” said Moore of the adjudicators. “They don’t have to follow the kind of rules of evidence that a court would. They can decide what evidence they want to hear, what evidence they don’t want to hear.”

A spokesperson for the ministry explained the discrepancy between the two cases was due to differing evidence. “The applications for this particular matter were not for the same things, the evidence differed, therefore, the outcome was different,” she wrote.

WE’s request for an interview with Rich Coleman, the minister in charge of the RTB, was denied.

reporter@westender.com

19 Emerald Terrace Tenants Win 4th Dispute Against Landlord at Residential Tenancy Branch

JANUARY 23, 2010

VANCOUVER – Tenants asserting persecution and intimidation by their landlord, Hollyburn Properties Limited, have been vindicated with their most recent win at the Residential Tenancy Branch.

Emerald Terrace Residents Speak Out At Press Conference Today

Emerald Terrace is the rental building where Hollyburn has employed numerous tactics in order to circumvent a BC Supreme Court ruling preventing them from evicting tenants for cosmetic renovations. Tactics include providing misinformation to tenants through “Resident Opinion Polls” in an effort to scare them out of the building and bogus letters stating their tenancies would end. Hollyburn also tried to evict 83-year old Lynn Stevens, a 40 year tenant battling cancer, because they claimed they needed her suite for a resident manager. Hollyburn’s attempt to evict 10 pet owners in 2009 was also thwarted when those tenants filed for dispute resolution at the RTB and had the evictions set aside.

Excerpts from Dispute Resolution Officer K. Millar’s decision:

“I find that the landlord deliberately misinformed the tenants regarding the impact of the plumbing re-pipe.”

I find that the misinformation above had that effect on the tenants and that as a result they were deprived of the right to live in an environment free from intimidation.”

“While to a non-resident the Opinion Poll can be taken to show the landlord’s commitment to upgrade the building which presumably would benefit the tenants, I accept that for the residents of the building it assumed a more sinister air.”

“Emerald Terrace is the tip of the iceberg” explains resident Cynthia Holmes. “These tactics have been exposed only because the tenants in this building had the wherewithal to fight. There is something wrong with the system and the legislation when landlord accountability is entirely dependent on tenant action.”

“Although the amount awarded really does not adequately compensate us for our troubles, I am happy that the decision is in our favour” says 82-year old tenant Les McBride. “My wife Olwen passed away and I believe the stress and anxiety caused by Hollyburn had a significant impact on her health during her final days.”

 

It’s happening in your community!

Hollyburn threatens 32 more evictions at Emerald Terrace

Hollyburn threatens 32 more evictions

GAY VILLAGE / ‘We have to stick together and fight it, otherwise these guys are going to win’: tenant

Natasha Barsotti / Vancouver / Thursday, May 20, 2010

Hollyburn is threatening another 32 longstanding tenants with eviction from their West End building to accommodate more than $2 million worth of “extensive improvements.”

"It's not fair that a lot of seniors in this building that have paid their rent on time, now all of a sudden are faced with this horrible stress," says 18-year Emerald Terrace tenant Ron Menini, who got an eviction notice on May 19. (Natasha Barsotti photo)

The latest eviction notices arrived on May 19, just two weeks after landlord Hollyburn Properties Limited told fellow Emerald Terrace residents Andrew Simmons and Lynn Stevens that they are being evicted from their suites to make room for two on-site managers.

In this latest move, Hollyburn issued two sets of letters to tenants: eviction notices to those who’ve lived at Emerald Terrace for a long time, and not-to-worry notices to those who’ve moved in recently and pay higher rents.

Hollyburn told the latter group of tenants they wouldn’t have to vacate Emerald Terrace since their suites were previously refurbished, and they will “not be drastically affected by the planned upgrades.”

However, tenants served eviction notices will have to vacate their suites by August 31.

Both letters offer to make the “affected residents’ transition as smooth as possible” and offer to transfer them to “any vacant Hollyburn residence in the West End renting within their budget.”

Both letters describe upcoming changes to the building’s flooring, plumbing and electrical systems as “extensive” and say they cannot by law “be performed while the suite is occupied.”

They also mention balcony improvements and “cosmetic retro-fits” to in-suite flooring, fixtures, cabinets and appliances.

According to the Residential Tenancy Act (RTA), you cannot evict people for cosmetic renovations, West-End MLA Spencer Chandra Herbert told a media conference outside the Nelson St building on May 20. “It’s not legal.”

Attempts to reach Hollyburn before posting this story were unsuccessful.

Chandra Herbert says Hollyburn has had “a record of trying this kind of thing.” He points to another West End building it owns, the Bay Towers on Harwood St, whose tenants fought Hollyburn’s attempts to evict them all the way to the BC Supreme Court, and won.

In 2007, the BC Court of Appeal also sided with 120 Richmond Gardens tenants in their fight with landlord Amacon Property Management Services.  Two out of three judges ruled that tenants cannot be thrown out to make way for renovations unless vacant possession is proven necessary.

“Yet here we are again,” Chandra Herbert says.

Long-term residents are being forced out of Emerald Terrace so that rents can be “massively” increased, he alleges.

Despite the Bay Towers and Richmond Garden court victories, he says, the RTA’s loopholes have yet to be plugged to prevent landlords from pursuing the eviction-by-renovation strategy.

He says it’s time to tighten up the legislation, and introduce the renters’ right of first refusal as Ontario has done.

Several of the 32 affected Emerald Terrace tenants – mostly seniors – say they’re going to fight Hollyburn’s move to evict them.

“You really feel like you want to get up and get out of there fast,” says Mary Milligan, who’s been an Emerald Terrace resident for almost four years. Last year, Hollyburn attempted to turf her and several other tenants in the building for owning pets. The tenants sought arbitration and won.

“We have to stick together and fight it, otherwise these guys are going to win and I don’t want to see them win,” Milligan says.

“It reminds me of exactly what we lived through,” says Janine Fuller, who still lives in the Bay Towers three years after she and partner Julie Stines took on Hollyburn.

Fuller notes the Bay Towers was “totally re-plumbed” while tenants remained in their suites.

“It’s not fair that a lot of seniors in this building that have paid their rent on time, now all of a sudden are faced with this horrible stress,” says Ron Menini, an 18-year resident at Emerald Terrace, also received an eviction notice.

“Watching this community change, the demographics change, is heartbreaking,” says Sharon Isaak of Renters at Risk, who came out in support of the Emerald Terrace residents.

“The West End is so diverse with the seniors, with the gay community, with young people – and that’s what makes it great,” she says.

Evicting entire buildings for profit is not a sustainable business practice, Isaak adds.

Like Chandra Herbert, Isaak wants RTA legislation strengthened to protect tenants from “this kind of behaviour.”

“When you buy and sell buildings, you buy and sell people,” she says.

“You can’t just be throwing people out on the streets repeatedly over and over, especially when the courts have said, ‘No, this practice is not okay, and you need to review this.’”