Struggling tenants are going on ‘rent strikes’ — and landlords are getting desperate

When Ontario's eviction freeze ends, Chris Rego fears he will be homeless.

Rego said he has lived in his Oshawa apartment for more than three years, in a bedroom without a proper door.

"I'm a good tenant. I pay my rent on time or early every month," Rego said.

Rego has been on a fixed income for a couple of years due to a physical disability, and after he has paid his rent, he barely scrapes by. He applied for provincial housing "many years ago," he said, but is still waiting.

So when he came up $200 short on his April rent, he hoped his landlord would let him wait until later to pay the balance.

"Most months, I'm not even able to buy food," Rego said. "So in April, I decided, you know what, I can't be kicked out. I need this $200. I hope they understand."

Instead, he says his landlord asked him to leave. Rego's landlord did not immediately respond to questions from the Star.

Rego can't be evicted during the pandemic - Ontario announced an eviction freeze March 16. But he is preparing himself for the worst when the freeze lifts, a date for which has not been set. He's tried to find a place to live to no avail, and has accepted that he may be homeless when landlords can start issuing eviction notices.

"I'm now officially doing a rent strike," he said, adding that unless he saves up now, he won't be able to afford a new place when one is available.

Rego thinks he'll be OK, having been homeless before, but he's worried about others who have found themselves in the same situation. He knows he isn't the only tenant withholding rent.

Bryan Doherty, one of the organizers of Keep Your Rent Toronto, is encouraging people to do just that.

"What we are seeing now is the COVID-19 crisis colliding with a decades-old housing crisis," Doherty said.

Before the eviction freeze was announced, Doherty says tenants were already worried about being able to afford their rent due to the economic fallout of COVID-19.

"The math just doesn't add up," Doherty said, adding that for many Toronto tenants, government plans like the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) or Employment Insurance (EI) aren't enough to cover rent, food and other necessities.

His group is asking the government to stand by tenants, including making sure landlords don't demand repayment or threaten them when the eviction freeze is lifted. He says this is meant to put the pressure upward, so that landlords ask their banks and the government for relief instead of putting the pressure on tenants.

"No one should have to choose between food and rent."

Doherty says when the eviction freeze lifts, landlords will have a decision to make - and so will tenants.

"If what happens is, when the dust clears, landlords make a move to make people homeless en masse because of what we just went through " people need to physically intervene on that situation " in their neighbourhoods and at the tribunal."

That tribunal, the Landlord and Tenant Board of Ontario, which is not operating as usual during the freeze, might not be able to handle those numbers.

Kayla Andrade, the founder of lobby group Ontario Landlords Watch, says the already backed-up adjudication system will only get worse. There's already a shortage of adjudicators, she says, leading to what was already a months-long wait before the pandemic began.

Andrade, a resident of Cambridge, Ont., has been advocating for more than a decade for a system-wide change that protects landlords and tenants. She wants the government to either provide more rent support to help both tenants and landlords during the pandemic, or put a freeze on rent and mortgages altogether.

"Now that the government is going through a pandemic, they're putting all the onus " onto private landlords," Andrade said.

Andrade says when the pandemic ends, many smaller landlords will sell their properties, resulting in higher rent and a tighter screening process for the units that remain.

Barrie resident Ian Foster is one of those landlords. He feels landlords are working in the only business not getting bailed out by the government, and he's tired of being lumped in with the big real estate companies.

"There is no light at the end of the tunnel," he said. "We're all worried about our future."

Andrade says while she understands the eviction freeze is meant to help tenants, it's leaving some landlords in a difficult position, and highlighting their vulnerability.

Chaman Sehgal is among them. His said his tenant has stopped paying full rent, which just covers the carrying cost of the house he bought for his parents, and he doesn't want to take the case to the Landlord and Tenant Board - the last time he did, it cost him several thousand dollars, he said.

He thinks landlords shouldn't have to pay interest on deferred mortgages during the pandemic.

"They have transferred the financial pressure over to us," Sehgal said. "Ontario needs to fill that gap."

He understands there are bad landlords out there, as well as bad tenants. But he feels many small landlords are get lumped in with the bigger ones.

For Steve da Silva and Hamza Zahid, the answers are not so clear cut.

Da Silva and Zahid are residents in neighbouring Scarborough buildings owned by the same landlord. Since the pandemic began and people in the buildings started losing their jobs, they say their landlord has been calling tenants demanding they pay rent, and has even been handing out N4s, which is a notice of early lease termination due to nonpayment of rent.

An N4 is not the same as an eviction order, and does not mean the tenant has to move out immediately.

"We have never and would never verbally call tenants to ask them to pay their rent with the CERB," the buildings' landlord, Edie Neuberger, said in an email response to the Star.

"When a very small number of tenants contacted us in writing with concerns, we worked with them on a case-by-case basis to apply for government support and reach a fair payment agreement," Neuberger said.

"Unfortunately, in cases where we did not hear from a tenant, we were unable to work with them on a remedy. In those cases, we initiated the legal administrative process necessary to collect overdue payments, acknowledging that eviction proceedings at the Landlord and Tenant Board are continuing, but hearings for rent evictions are temporarily suspended," the email said.

Da Silva said that although some tenants wrote to the landlord asking for leeway with April's rent, the landlord went ahead and took the rent anyway from tenants who had pre-authorized payments set up.

"She just went ahead and processed those, despite many tenants asking for some clemency," Zahid said. "It revealed that she had no intentions to try to negotiate with people."

In response, Neuberger said: "A tenant is free to cancel their pre-authorized payments at any time and in fact, can cancel a pre-authorized payment, extending to two days after the payment has been processed. If the landlord was aware that a tenant wished to cancel their pre-authorized payment, it would have done so without question."

Tenants should "feel free to write to us if they are in need of rent relief," Neuberger's response to the Star concludes.

Rego says he understands the landlords' perspective during the pandemic, but feels the law is on their side. If there wasn't such a need for government housing, he thinks far fewer people would be in the situation he's facing now.

"Everyone's so afraid of being homeless that they're not willing to stand up for (themselves)."

Da Silva and Zahid agree. Zahid says the rising cost of rent in Toronto combined with stagnant incomes means CERB barely covers a month's cost of living for most.

They say the pandemic is an opportunity for people to come together and show that change is needed.

"I think the pandemic is just shining a light and bringing into sharper focus the power differential between landlords and tenants," da Silva said.

"A year from now, I hope to see a stronger community."

Rosa Saba is a Calgary-based reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rosajsaba