Tenants of a 30-suite Esquimalt apartment building that’s about to be renovated will have to move out after the Residential Tenancy Branch allowed an eviction order to go ahead.
The landlord, Sturdee Investments, wants to clear out the Sturdee Street building to allow the renovation to proceed.
Rents in the building — which currently range from about $800 to $1,500 a month — could double after the renovation, said Douglas King, a lawyer and executive director of the Together Against Poverty Society, which has been working with the tenants.
In a letter to tenants, King said the eviction order was granted “on the basis that the repair work will require an extended period of vacancy and asbestos remediation.”
Tenant Ilene Koculyn, a 68-year-old retiree, pays $830 a month for a one-bedroom suite out of her monthly pension of about $1,800.
She said she’s resigned to the fact she’ll have to move out, although she doesn’t yet have a place to go.
“It’s quite definite now, that’s for sure,” Koculyn said, adding 12 to 15 tenants remain in the building. “It just kind of ticks me off that people get away with this.”
Koculyn said she’s confident she will find somewhere to go, thanks to help from the John Howard Society and the office of Esquimalt-Metchosin MLA Mitzi Dean.
She said several tenants have to move out by Sept. 30 after accepting a $5,000 payout from the landlord on condition they give up the right to challenge their eviction.
Others, including her, who signed a later agreement through the Together Against Poverty Society, can stay until Nov. 30 if need be, Koculyn said.
King said that Sturdee Investments principal Andrew Rebeyka has a history of renovating apartment buildings, then renting units out again at higher rates.
Rebeyka could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.
King said Tuesday that the branch’s decision was “a little surprising” because landlords don’t seem to have been trying over the past two or three years to get evictions for renovations as much as they had been.
“It was just a bit shocking to have a file again where we had a whole building that was looked at being cleared out.”
The decision could be a sign that more such evictions involving older buildings and long-term tenants will follow, King said.
Despite the overall process having been changed to make it harder for landlords to evict, the legal standard remains the same, he said.
“There’s no obligation for the landlord, really, to take care of the tenant and that really shows in a case like this,” King said.
He said tenants of the Esquimalt building include those on disability assistance who have lived there for 20 years. “Their rent is really, really low, and they are the ones who are impacted by far the most by this.”
King said he knows of at least two tenants who have decided to leave the province for lower rents.
These kinds of renovictions come at a cost to the government and to taxpayers, he said.
“People who were paying private-market rent and were able to afford it are now going to have to get into a subsidized unit, which means month-over-month the government is paying part of their rent for them,” King said. “It is a loss for the taxpayer when that happens.”
There is intense pressure on the subsidized-housing system right now because rising rents are putting more people in a position of having to rely on some sort of subsidy, he said.
King said an analysis is need to determine if it makes more sense to subsidize more housing or to protect low-income housing stock like the Sturdee Street complex.
