Press Hits

Tenants of 1270 and 1280 Webster Street have won a renoviction battle against their landlord, earning the right to stay in their homes. The fight has been ongoing for almost two and a half years. “I feel like I’ve been on the threshold of hell. I’m feeling greatly relieved that I don’t have to move, you don’t even know,” said Marni Skilton, an ACORN member who lives in the Webster buildings. “I thank ACORN for everything they’re doing. Without them, we wouldn’t have made it. We needed that support and organization.”

Hamilton renters tired of suffering from sweltering heat in the summer are urging city council to set a maximum temperature for all rental units in the city, after council’s planning committee voted 10-0 on Tuesday to require landlords who provide air conditioning to make sure they can cool units to 26 degrees Celsius or less. The measure only applies to landlords who have agreed within a lease to provide air conditioning, leaving out tenants such as Kayla Leet, who spoke to the committee on Tuesday. “My building unfortunately won’t benefit because my landlord only provides heating,” said Leet, a member of Acorn, a tenants’ advocacy group. She says she’s resorted to putting tinfoil on her windows to try to reflect some of the heat. “On extreme heat days in the summer it measured 32 [degrees C] with the tinfoil on the windows and 34 [degrees C] without them.”

Dozens of residents at 1270 and 1280 Webster Street learned less than a week before their Landlord Tenant Board (LTB) hearing that their landlord had dropped an appeal that was filed in April 2023. In response, tenants joined forces with the tenants’ advocacy group ACORN and held several protests. Their efforts gained the attention of city officials, who passed London’s renoviction bylaw in September 2024.

City councils in Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, London and New Westminster are asking the question. Are renoviction bylaws a step too far or not far enough? Join Ian Hanomansing on CBC Radio One, CBC Listen and CBC News Network.

Ottawa renters need to earn more than double the minimum wage to afford a vacant one-bedroom apartment in the capital, according to a new report. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a report titled “Making Rent: The CCPA’s rental wage update 2024” on Thursday, looking at the hourly wage needed to afford rent while working a standard 40-hour week and spending 30 per cent of their income on housing.

LaSean Ebanks, a Black renter and co-chair of Peel ACORN, said the region has seen a sharp rise in no-fault evictions — including N12 notices used when a landlord or one of their immediate family members intends to move into a unit, and N13 notices filed so the landlord can conduct demolitions or major renovations. ACORN’s analysis of Landlord and Tenant Board data found Brampton had the second-highest number of N12s in Ontario between 2017 and 2021, with 1,193 notices. Between 2017 and 2022, the city also saw a 230 per cent increase in N13s. However, Ebanks said those figures only capture official filings to the Landlord and Tenant Board. “In our direct work, we’ve encountered many more cases where tenants were pressured, intimidated, or made to feel they had no choice but to leave without formal due process,” he said.