Despite a provincial rent freeze, tenants living in subsidized housing are facing increasing rents they fear could force them out of their homes.
Taylor, a Saanich mother of two young children, is worried about being evicted from her Royal Oak townhouse, where rent is geared to family income, if she can’t come up with an extra $400 in the next two weeks.
She found out on Saturday her rent has been reassessed at $964 as of Dec. 1, a bump of $400, based on her husband’s expected employment insurance payments — but they don’t know when that money will come through.
“I’m not going to be able to find $400 just lying around,” said Taylor, who asked to be identified by only her first name.
Taylor is receiving about $1,800 a month through the Canada Recovery Benefit and her husband is expecting EI after being laid off from his landscaping job.
The rent increase came as a surprise to Taylor, who believed B.C.’s rent freeze, effective until July 10, 2021, applied to her.
However, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing says the freeze does not apply to housing where rent is geared to income. Rents are assessed each year and fluctuate based on the tenant’s income, said a spokesperson for the ministry.
Taylor, who has lived in the home managed by the Capital Region Housing Corp. for four years, is worried about what will happen if the EI money doesn’t arrive in time. She knows from experience it can take more than a month to receive EI payments.
“I don’t want to lose my place over this. Especially during a pandemic right now. I couldn’t imagine anyone could have to go through this,” she said.
Another woman, who didn’t want to be named, is facing a rent hike of about $200 a month. She lives in a townhouse managed by Pacifica Housing and her rent was reassessed based on her income as an educational assistant as well as $2,000 in EI benefits, which she stopped receiving when she returned to work in September.
She’s been told she needs a letter from Service Canada to confirm she’s no longer receiving the benefit before her rent can be reduced. After getting sick and taking a week of unpaid time off, cutting her paycheque in half, she took another day off last month to spend hours on the phone with Service Canada.
She’s still waiting for a letter to confirm she’s no longer receiving emergency benefits.
“It’s causing me a lot of anxiety, because we’ve had hardly any food in our house. I’ve never had empty cupboards or an empty fridge basically until COVID started,” she said.
The Capital Region Housing Corporation and Pacifica Housing both said they could not comment on individual cases.
Douglas King, executive director of Together Against Poverty Society, say these situations reflect problems in a fragmented system where one person or a family often accesses financial supports from multiple agencies to get by each month, leaving people to navigate bureaucracy in several places at once.
A move to universal basic income, which would see government set an income threshold and provide financial top-up to everyone below that level, could eliminate the red tape many struggle with to access support, he said.
“One of the main tenets of basic income is to save the money that you’re spending on all of these government agencies that are responsible for essentially policing low-income people to make sure that they get the exact amount that they’re supposed to get, and just provide them with more support instead,” King said.
“There’s some pretty significant studies that are showing how much healthier that is not only for the individual, but for the government, as well.”
In normal times, a model where rent is geared to income generally works, because incomes are more consistent and predictable, but during the pandemic many have experienced job losses, reduced hours and fluctuating incomes, he said.
“We’ve seen these these ups and downs in income as a result of the pandemic, which has really tested a lot of our systems and some of them, like the rent geared to income system, is not really catered to those fluctuations. They are much more used to a level of stability,” he said.
The transition from the Canada Emergency Response Benefit to EI has been rocky, with people reporting delays receiving their payments, King said.
“When there’s so little room for error, any kind of glitch — one cheque missed, one delay in a cheque payment — could be the difference between keeping and losing housing.”
