“You will never be rich!” » said one of my neighbors who also became my friend. Assailed while laughing, and with obvious affection, his joke still betrayed a certain astonishment. It’s because I had just told him the amount of rent that I ask my tenants.
I don’t own a lot of homes. I have a modest triplex in the Ahuntsic district of Montreal. I live on the ground floor and I rent the two small 3 1/2 rooms on the second floor. Even if I increase my rents a little each year, according to the suggestions of the Administrative Housing Tribunal (TAL), their price remains slightly below the market. It’s a choice that I made, not because I am independent of wealth, far from it, but because it corresponds to my vision of the world.
Abbot Pierre said: “The honor of a country does not lie in the beauty of its monuments, but in the fact that all its inhabitants have a roof. » You won’t often see me quote a French Catholic priest, but I find this sentence particularly relevant in the midst of the housing crisis.
To better fit it into our Canadian context, we could replace “the beauty of monuments” with “the number of Olympic gold medals in hockey”. Please hear me clearly, I love hockey. I would dream of having a picnic on a pontoon with Marie-Philip Poulin and Sidney Crosby. I even hosted a show on hockey on RDS, that’s to say. I am deeply attached to our national sport, but it is not hockey that makes us a great nation, it is our social climate and our quality of life.
Or should I say “it was”? Because it was good to live in Canada in the past.
For several decades now, cities like Toronto and Vancouver have seen real estate prices explode. It has become more and more complicated to find affordable accommodation there. Now this evil has spread to Montreal, and almost everywhere in the province.
How can we explain this unreasonable explosion? If I rely on the few notions of economics that I learned from my high school course, there is a question of supply and demand. The stronger the demand, the more scarcity there is, the more prices increase.
In the case of housing, it is a disaster for many of our fellow citizens. If you can replace a filet mignon that has become unaffordable with medium-lean ground steak or chickpeas and obtain approximately the same protein intake, it is difficult to do the same with accommodation. A family of four cannot go from a 5 1/2 to a 1 1/2 and find the same comfort. We can, if necessary, change neighborhoods and leave big cities, provided that our work allows us to do so and that housing is available there.
But there are not thousands of solutions, especially when the real estate stock does not increase as quickly as needs, when dubious “renovictions” multiply and when certain housing is only offered as short-term rental of the type Airbnb.
It is in this very particular situation that I consciously decided not to increase my rents, even when tenants change. I believe that housing is a fundamental right. If I can get a roof over my head at a decent price and allow two or three other people to enjoy it too, that suits me just fine. Obviously, if I were carrying out major renovations, I would cover part of the costs by increasing rent prices.
I’m not the only owner to embrace this philosophy, but few of us say it, and even fewer value it. There is no lobby of friendly owners. We have no political weight, even less recognition. I would like to have a small tax credit for service rendered to society. I know, I can always dream. At least a plaque on my building reading: “Here live owners who believe in the common good and happy tenants”? In Licorne-Ville perhaps, but here, in Montreal, in 2023, I almost come across as a dirty leftist who wants to destroy capitalism with my reasonable prices.
It is obvious that we cannot require all landlords to keep their rents below the current price. There are some who earn their living from their buildings. They take all financial risks on the purchase and assume all responsibilities for building maintenance. On the other hand, we could reasonably stem excessive rent increases during lease changes.
Some rents increased by 14.5% when tenants changed, according to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), despite the little-known section G. It is in this section of the lease that the landlord must enter the lowest amount paid for rent over the last 12 months, which allows the tenant to request justification for the requested increase. If the increase appears unjustified and no compromise seems possible between the two parties, the tenant can turn to the TAL, which will set a new amount.
It seems that this measure is not stopping anyone. The demand is so great that landlords just have to turn to other tenants willing to accept their conditions.
Furthermore, I know full well that it will take more than empathetic landlords to solve the housing crisis. It will take a lot of political will and a series of concrete and complex measures to meet demand.
In the meantime, my fate should not change too much. I will probably never be rich, as my friend says so well, but I am not without wealth. I maintain a special bond of trust with my tenants who take care of my apartments, pay rubly and take out my recycling when I forget to do it. That, these days, is worth gold.
Salomé Corbo is an actress, improviser, author and citizen as best she can.