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Newsstand: March 23, 2015
Apparently the strip club industry is on a slow but steady decline in Canada due to falling demand. There's a hot topic for Monday morning water-cooler talk! In the news today: a Toronto resident on disability is facing eviction because of bungled government payments, Parkdale tenants are fighting dramatic rent increases, and city council may decide to give public housing renters more say in where they live.
Andrew McLean, a Toronto resident who receives disability payments because of a back injury, has been evicted from his apartment and forced to find new lodgings due to delayed automatic payments from the Ontario government to his landlord. When his eviction was delayed by two weeks so that he wouldn’t have to stay in a hotel, McLean received some small comfort, but he says the eviction never should have happened in the first place because the tardy payments were not his doing. The government sent a portion of his disability cheques directly to the landlord. Crowdfunding efforts have raised more than $1,200 for McLean, and the Housing Stabilization Fund, which works to keep Ontario welfare and disability recipients from becoming homeless, has pitched in $1,600. Still, McLean says he’d prefer to stay in his old apartment. “I don’t know why the government just doesn’t say, ‘OK, we’re at fault. We’ll call Realstar and straighten it out,'” he said.
Tenants in a Parkdale apartment building owned by Swedish real estate giant Akelius are fighting consecutive annual rent increases of nearly five per cent. The apartments at 188 Jameson Street are home to many people who can’t afford the increases Akelius has applied for in both 2014 and 2015, including a number of Tibetan refugees. The company says it’s done extensive renovations and upgrades and is trying to recoup some of its investment, but tenants say the company’s decision to remove on-site superintendents has left problems unattended to; residents now phone a call centre to register a new issue. Tenants are planning to protest outside the main Toronto office of Akelius today.
City Councillor Ana Bailão (Ward 18, Davenport) wants to see the city’s available community housing units online so that prospective renters can look at them and have some say in where they live. They have a say now, but because community housing staffers are required to give each applicant ample time to consider and decide on a unit, the average vacancy time for community housing spaces last year was 45 days. The project Bailão wants to move forward already launched as a pilot, during which time it reduced those 45 days to 22 and cut the average number of calls city staff were making about free units from nine to 1.5. Still, giving prospective renters more of a private-sector experience and cutting down on wait times aren’t the whole solution. Kenneth Hale, the legal director for Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, told the Globe and Mail that the real problem is a dearth of public housing spaces. “It’s really hard to talk about competition or empowerment when there’s such a scarcity,” he said.