NEWS RELEASE TODAY FROM ACTO Tenant advocates are cheering Bill 82, the Residential Tenancies Amendment Act (Rules Relating to Rent Increases), tabled today by NDP MPP Cindy Forster. The Bill would extend rent regulation to more than 50,000 tenant households currently without legal protections. “Thousands of tenants are vulnerable to exorbitant and unjustified rent increases under the current laws, simply because they live in buildings built after November 1, 1991,” said Kenn Hale, Director of Legal Services at the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO). “Bill 82 would establish fair protections for all sitting tenants in the private market and increase housing affordability without any expenditure of public funds.” Currently, the Residential Tenancies Act (RTA) prohibits annual rent increases above a provincially-set guideline for most tenant households, with the exception of buildings built after November 1, 1991. If passed, Bill 82 would remove this exemption. The RTA still allows landlords to raise rents by any amount once a sitting tenant vacates a rental unit. “Those opposed to the proposed amendment have argued that fair rent rules would prevent new rental units from being developed and so the loophole has remained in place for years,” said Mary Todorow, policy analyst for ACTO. “However, the exemption from regulation has not sparked the construction of badly-needed rental housing.” Ontario has averaged just 3,270 rental starts each year from 1995-2012. Experts estimate that the demand for new rental units in Ontario is 10,000 homes per year. In Toronto, only 8% of the residential housing starts since 2006 were purpose-built rental and only a fraction of these were developed by the private sector. The Toronto CMA, with the largest renter population in Canada, has the 2nd highest average two-bedroom rent in the country at $1,183 – unaffordable to at least half of the areas’ tenant households. The Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario is a community legal clinic, funded by Legal Aid Ontario, with a province-wide mandate.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Jun 2013 23:57:44 +0000
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