The tenants of a 29-unit rooming house on North Street in Halifax will have to pack their belongings and look for new housing by September after the owners gave notice they’re emptying the building.
In April, the tenants were given a letter from the building’s owners saying there will be no further lease renewals for current tenants. The rooms go for less than $1,000 per month and many tenants are low-income.
The letter, provided to CBC News by a tenant, encourages residents to speak to their social worker or any support staff to “immediately start looking for options.” This comes less than two years after CBC News reported the building’s owners attempted to raise rent by 30 per cent for tenants on income assistance.
Dalhousie Legal Aid Service in Halifax has been working with some of the residents. It sent out a media advisory Thursday morning to say the eviction appears to be part of a pattern being used to circumvent the province’s temporary rent cap.
The release quoted Harris Romkey, a tenant of the building for 27 years, who said he worries people will end up on the street by the fall, adding to Halifax’s growing homeless population.
“These landlords are trying to evict 39 low-income people in the middle of a homelessness and housing crisis,” Romkey said in the release. “It’s not right.”
After the first notice went out, the tenants on periodic leases were given forms called a DR5 — an agreement to end their tenancy for renovations or demolition. The tenants on fixed-term leases were simply told they wouldn’t be given a new lease when their current lease expires, which is legal.
Landlords say they’ve ‘followed every rule’
Property records show 6273 North Street is owned by CB MacDonald Properties Ltd. Nova Scotia’s Registry of Joint Stock Companies shows the directors, officers, and recognized agent of CB MacDonald Properties are Adam Conter, Tom Jockel and Dan Jockel.
The three men took possession of the North Street property in December 2021.
CBC News contacted Conter on Wednesday, who sent an emailed statement Thursday, stressing that the owners are following the legal processes laid out in the Residential Tenancies Act.
Conter said they’ve spent 18 months reaching out to housing organizations and the provincial and municipal government, seeking partnerships to provide support for the tenants at the property and get funding to maintain it.
“We were told that the only way we can get support is to be a charity, and that a charity would only want to support if the building was empty,” Conter said.
“While the accusations against a landlord in this challenging time for housing grabs headlines, we’ve offered to act as partners and work towards a constructive solution for the community as we’ve successfully proven in some of our other properties.”
Tenants being renovicted, says legal worker
Sydnee Blum, a community legal worker with Dalhousie Legal Aid Service in Halifax, is calling the situation a renoviction — the act of evicting tenants to renovate a building and then increasing the rent charged to new tenants.
“Across the province, we see situations where landlords are using renovictions to get around the rent cap. Here we have a landlord who has already been caught trying to skirt the cap,” Blum said in the release.
In March 2021, Nova Scotia’s ban on renovictions was lifted when the province’s state of emergency ended. However, new protections for tenants were added to the Residential Tenancies Act.
The protections include that the tenant must be given at least three months of notice and the landlord must compensate the tenant with between one and three months of rent, depending on the building’s size. Additional compensation may be awarded to the tenant if the landlord does not follow the new rules or is found to have acted in bad faith.
Blum said she believes the eviction may not be in good faith, noting there are no active building permits listed for the address on the municipality’s website.
She has been going door to door in the building speaking with tenants. She said many didn’t know they may be entitled to legal protection.
“We are concerned that some tenants may have already been offered buyouts as an incentive for leaving without being given the proper compensation to which they are entitled,” Blum said in the release.
Romkey said conditions in the building have been “terrible,” citing bugs, mould, and barely functioning bathrooms. Other tenants have told CBC there have been issues getting necessary repairs and pest control in the building.
But many tenants have stayed because they couldn’t afford anything else as Halifax’s rents continue to climb.
