The landlord had told them he wanted to raise the rent to $3,500 and when they complained he decided to raise it to $9,500.
“We know that our building is not rent controlled and this was something we were always worried about happening and there is no way we can afford $9,500 per month," Yumna Farooq said.
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It shows that “no rent control” basically means “your landlord can throw you out at any time without notice” by raising rent to a ludicrous amount. It completely undermines all other tenant protections. Even conservatives should be supporting at least modest rent controls to prevent cases like this.
Modest is what we had before. Never vote Conservative.
I think last year’s inflation spike demonstrates that “2.5% per year regardless of your carrying costs or maintenance costs changing due to interest rates and inflation” is not modest. A reasonable rent control policy would let landlords gradually adapt to market realities without giving them the power to gouge or de-facto evict tenants with sudden rent spikes.
Yes, rent control, our panacea.
Negative Effects on Supply: Rent control can potentially lead to housing shortages over the long term. When landlords are unable to raise rents to cover maintenance and operating costs or to generate a reasonable return on their investment, they may have less incentive to maintain or invest in their properties. This can lead to a deterioration in the quality of rental housing and a reduction in the overall supply of rental units. In some cases, landlords may convert rental properties into other uses, such as condominiums or commercial spaces, further reducing the supply of rental housing.
Inefficiencies and Reduced Mobility: Rent control can lead to inefficiencies in the housing market. Tenants in rent-controlled units may have less incentive to move, even if their housing needs change, because they want to keep their low rents. This reduced mobility can make it harder for new renters to find suitable housing.
Selective Impact: Rent control often applies to older buildings or units built before a certain date. This can create disparities in rent levels between newer and older housing stock, potentially discouraging the construction of new rental units and leading to further imbalances in the housing market.
A short term band-aid that causes long term problems. Government price controls are a tale as old as time.
Jesus, I’m getting it from both ends here, somebody else is dumping on me for suggesting that a rent-control system that’s a few points above inflation so that landlords could adapt to the market without abruptly bankrupting their tenants was somehow a reasonable compromise.
I’m not arguing for extreme rent-control policies, just that no rent control is bad because it lets landlords write their own eviction laws.
Peg it at like 2.5% or 5% per year above inflation and you can’t use it as a sudden backdoor eviction but you also let landlords adapt to market reality over time.
Capping rents might be stupid for all the reasons economists say, but putting a damper on sudden price shifts is just being humane.
The “humane” thing would be to make any and all rent seeking behavior very explicitly illegal, but that’s unlikely to happen.
So wait where do college students live in your world?
Before I took economics in college I would have downvoted you. Price ceilings don’t solve the problem.
Before I took economics in college I would have downvoted you.
Now that you have studied economics, what do you think he got wrong that keeps you from pressing the “This is factual” button now?
It’s funny, somehow I managed to understand this before any college. Because supply and demand are supposedly quite intuitive.
So the first point is simply false, the second point is symptomatic of the third point which is simply an example of a poor policy.
Also the second half of the third point is completely fucked off. If new construction were exempt from rent control then your ROI would be better on building units than buying units.
Nice ChatGPT copypasta, bro
It was a lot faster than writing it myself
Sure, but it’s irrelevant. There’s no economical rigor behind those statements. They could be true, they could be hallucinated.
I didn’t just type it into ChatGPT and copy/paste whatever it wrote without looking it over lol
I don’t know how this law passed but it should definitely be repealed
Ok, your rent is now $1 million. A month.
Name them and shame them.
Regardless of who is in the right or wrong here, please don’t post personally identifiable information if the source is not public.
While it’s important to push for justice and fairness, there’s a distinction between advocating for fairness and doxxing / calling for mob justice. We don’t have formal rules for this stuff yet, but use your best judgment and report any comments that veer into harmful territory.
I’ll try to post a discussion thread on proposed rules sometime in the future, but this seems like a good one to bring up in the meantime. Feel free to share thoughts, and thank you :)
Maybe not here, maybe not us. But that landlord’s name ought to be made public by the media.
That’s fair yes :)
Before mobbing the landlord, it would be a good idea to know what’s the real story behind this. Maybe the sisters were assholes. We don’t know that.
Found the landlord
Haha, I’m not! But I would be intrigued to know what’s the real reason behind the landlord’s move. I know we like to believe that all landlord are assholes but let’s love in reality where nuance is everything shall we ?
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 7•1 year ago
Ya. It sounds like they wanted to raise the rent to $3500 which the landlord clearly thought was being reasonable for this building. They bitched about it so the landlord raised the rent high enough to get rid of them.
Sounds like the gambled and lost. Instead of going to the news, they should have tried to negotiate back to $3500 or something close. Good luck now.
Bumping the rent from $2500 to $3500/month is clearly not reasonable.
This really depends. If the building is rentable for 5000 than it is. Like it or not.
If 2500 was reasonable back then, then it still is reasonable right now.
Unless gigantic upgrades were performed to the house that warrant a 1000 price hike, which I highly doubt.
Just because the market is fucked doesn’t mean you get to make the market even worse.
Except the price of food building materials renovation costs went up by about 100% where i live realistically. So a landlord isn’t going to just take the fact that their 2500 whatever is now only worth 1700 whatevers.
If accepting a lease on a post-2018 construction, knowing that no rent control was in force, was reasonable then, it is still reasonable now. Live with your choices.
having no rent control is never reasonable. People only accepted places without rent control because all other options are shit too
You like profiting from others misery. It’s not illegal and it’s not generally even frowned upon but it’s still shitty and you have to own it
You realize that there’s people living in these apartments right? You know there’s a housing crisis right now that’s fueled by housing investors from all over the world and shit like Airbnb and corporate greed, right?
It’s so cool how you can lose your home for disagreeing with a landlord.
When escalation of this magnitude is your solution, you shouldn’t be surprised when your clients respond with violence.
It doesn’t really help the case that they show a picture a sky line dream apartment, but still that price is ridiculous and obviously there to drive them out.
The top 0.01% laughs as you nibble at the heals of the top 1%
This absolutely should not be legal
Why?
In both the Western countries I’ve lived so far (France and Italy, but my guess is the list is much longer), this wouldn’t be possible.
The landlord could at most adjust the rent to inflation.
The only wag he/she could ask for such a steep increase is by making a brand new contract with someone else, but for that purpose the current contract should be terminated, which isn’t possible if your occupants are paying their rent, unless he/she wants to re-take possession for selling the apartment/house or to live in it. If they fake the repossession and actually end up renting again to an inflated price, the new contract is deemed void and the previous occupants could be reinstated.
It makes any other sort of renter protections moot if they can basically be evicted whenever by saying the rent is now $1,000,000 take it or leave it.
Well they can just purchase their own property and not have to pay rent, right? If someone raised the rent to $1mil I don’t think anyone would live there, it’s a free market no?
The point of raising the rent to ludicrous amounts isn’t to actually get that amount, it’s to get rid of your tenants which usually have protections. This is just a cheap way around those protections and a loophole that should be closed.
Because people need housing to live in, so it’s in the interest of the vast majority of people to make sure the few that own property can’t increase rent by 100s of % for no good reason. Additionally we live in a democracy so usually the interests of the majority are supposed to guide policy making even if it upsets the minority that control access to resources because they won’t profit quite as much as otherwise.
Is there anything holding them back from buying their own property and not having to pay rent?
Fuck Canada, more than half of Canadian politicians are fucking landlords and this is why they allow these abusive and scummy laws to stay, no rent protection, fuck this country.
Does that mean the landlord has to charge the next tennant that rate, or was that a special rate just for them? Can they charge different rents fir different people based on whether they like the tennant?
I was wondering thia too. Without control, they can probably just lower it again once the tenants leave.
They must have really pissed off the landlord. It doesn’t say what they asked for in the lease agreement changes… Or what they said to him when they “complained” when he raised the rent initially by a smaller amount.
Still ridiculous that it’s legal to raise rent by that much, but oof, if you’re in one of those buildings, be nice to your landlord.
Edit: i think people are taking what I said the wrong way - I’m saying with the way things are, if landlords can get away with this, they hold all the power!
Edit2: I guess I’m the bad guy here, but I recommend you focus your rage on Ford who set this shit up in the first place.
raised the rent initially by a smaller amount.
You write ‘doubled’ funny.
Source on doubled? There’s no mention in the article of the initial rent
Edit: For all we know the initial rent increase could have been $50. But sure, I’m the bad guy for pointing out lack of info
Sisters Khadeja and Yumna Farooq say a Toronto landlord is raising their rent by $7,000 per month
Which means an initial rent of about $2500? So not doubled.
Good catch. And yet I’m getting downvoted 🤷♂️
Witch hunts on lemmy are even more indiscriminate than they were on Reddit. There’s just no in between.
You said there is no information on the initial rent, but there is. So why should people not down vote you?
Yes, let’s ignore the guy who made the inaccurate claim, which is the entire reason I asked for a source
I didn’t catch that it doubled. Jeez. Landlord is a tool.
Exactly the same problem in Québec, buildings 5 years or less have no law nor rent control, so it’s free for all for the landlord to raise a rent from 1500$ to 4000$ as he wants.
By the looks of it, Toronto might get worse than Vancoucer for rent prices very soon.
Damn I didn’t realise the Ford government weakened it to 2018 and before. Reminds me of a lot of US states, although they have a cutoff in the fucking 70s sometimes
I wonder if there are information or anonymised statistics regarding the portion of elected representatives, senators and members of the judiciary from municipal, provincial and federal bodies/institutions that own more than a property (principal residence).
How many properties? What type of properties (from residential single family to high rise residential appartments/condominium, from empty/rundown/abandoned farmhouses/buildings to unused farm/land, etc…) What purpose do they have for those properties? Do those properties generate some kind of revenue? If so, how much? How is the revenue generated?
While thinking about it, how much of all properties in Canada are tied up behind a corporate veil by companies/fondations/trusts and various legal entities? Are there statistics on that?
There are too many unknowns and legal protections behind those unknown to be able to make a clear picture of the housing crisis.
I don’t want the scapegoat excuse of too much RED TAPE to build new housing or that IT’S THE IMMIGRANTS and the FOREIGN WORKERS or FOREIGN INVESTORS/SPECULATORS took all our housing. That’s too easy of a excuse to avoid the real and difficult work of understanding this whole mess.
I want real data, not proxy data. Full information on every transfer of property; from whom to whom, by which financial institution, for exactly how much, timespan elapsed between transfer of ownership, who is the mortgage holder if a loan is involved, renovation details if there has been any, every inspection report and details should always be public and attached to the property for the life of the property as a historical snapshot of the property, etc…
It’s not that hard to implement these data gathering services but there are always deeply vested interests that would do everything in their power to discourage such endeavors and make up any excuse to avoid providing it.
Anyways, sorry this became a long rambling rant on my part.
It’s disgusting that we have to deal with this kind of shit in CA or the US. Even worse are the ghouls conspiring to jack up rates for renters by purchasing large amounts of housing then jacking up rates in coordinated manners. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-makes-rent-setting-software-for-landlords-sued-for-collusion/?comments=1&comments-page=1
This shit should be so illegal.
And what if we grind out all those numbers and there’s nothing magical? What if it really is just supply and demand?
Then you have become the first person ever to find the fabled Golden Goose who shits out money for the rich, no strings attached.
So the golden goose is just “have something people need and there’s not enough of it”?
I’ve always thought the hard “full rent control no hikes above inflation” “no rent control do whatever” dichotomy was stupid.
Why not compromise? Like 5% above inflation (or $50, whichever is higher) on all properties, regardless of how old or new they are. Allows a landlord to adapt to a shifting market, and gives a renter plenty of time to adapt and adjust as a landlord is changing rent yearly.
Then get rid of all the silly “year constructed” exceptions.
Assuming that’s a photo of the apartment, that shit would be like 15k a month in NY. Not that any of it’s right, just, or moral, but they definitely had it better than most to be paying that little for what many would consider quite a luxury apartment.
I’m guessing there’s a rule against this, unless he can find another tenant that will actually pay that.
It won’t be that price for a new tenant. This is special just for them.
Yeah, I think you’re right, and I’m pretty sure this is super illegal as a result.
There is nothing in the RTA that says they can’t do this
Hmm, so it doesn’t look like there’s a rule against evicting someone for no reason, unless you can prove discrimination, which is mildly surprising to me,
but there is a cap on the amount they can bump up rent without special permission in many types of units. Based on that the landlord doesn’t have a leg to stand on unless they switch to just openly telling the person to leave, but IANAL.Edit: Oh wait, it says it’s a brand new unit that this doesn’t apply to. RIP.
