The issue of renovictions in Guelph has made its way to city hall.
A number of residents went to Guelph city council on Tuesday where a discussion was happening at committee of the whole on whether to draft a renoviction bylaw for the city. There were dozens more who made their feelings known through correspondence.
Some in attendance made delegations to the committee sharing their stories of how they were forced out of their homes in order to accommodate work being done in their buildings.
“This past January, we got a notice that the building was under new ownership,” said Daniel Kaufman, a 12-year resident of Guelph who has been living in an apartment building on Brant Avenue for the past 10 years.
“A few months go by and we were hoping it was nothing big, though some tenants were sounding alarms.”
Kaufman went on to say appliances were breaking down in the units but received no attention from the landlord, and that the storage lockers in the building were deemed a fire hazard and being removed even though no fire inspection was done.
“In July … we got an eviction notice saying that our leases were being terminated.”
The committee did not proceed with drafting a bylaw. It has instead directed staff to post a list of tenants rights on the city’s website as well as a renovictions survey.
“We want to make sure the checks and balances for the rights of that tenants are being considered throughout that renovation process,” Mayor Cam Guthrie said. “The unit will be offered back to the tenant at the same price or that the tenant be given an option of money to leave.”
Staff will be gathering feedback from the survey and the information will be presented at their next committee of the whole meeting on Oct. 8 as part of an encompassing discussion on affordable housing.
Guthrie, a proponent of building more homes as a way to address affordability, said it doesn’t make sense to tear down old buildings just to build new ones.
“Keeping people in homes that they have is part of the solution to housing,” he said. “As we look at the other side of the scale of building new homes, we can’t ignore the other side about trying to keep people in the homes that they have.”
Guthrie also believes the provincial government should step in and come up with legislation that covers everything around renovictions.
“It doesn’t make any sense to have 444 municipalities across Ontario with a patchwork of all these different types of bylaws and policies,” he said. “The province, instead, could make a blanket policy that covers these gaps that we are seeing at the city level.”