East York Tenants Group

Toronto city councillor, Howard Moscoe has done a complete about turn from his former support for landlord licensing (as weakened as his version was) in favor of an even weaker auditing plan put forth by head of the City’s Municipal Licensing and Standards Department, Jim Hart.

The new auditing plan will be the only fleshed-out proposal to go before the Mayor’s Executive Committee for a vote on Monday, November 10th and if passed, as is likely with no other real proposals on the table, would take effect on Dec. 1st.

According to The Toronto Sun, the auditing scheme would be ‘operated by a team of 12 MLS officers with a background in building audits — will proactively inspect 176 rental (private and social housing) buildings determined to be the most in need of repair by the end of 2009. That compares to the 14 inspected to date this year.

Four buildings, with six units or more, will be selected from each ward based on complaints and will be put through extensive audits of their structure, mechanical and electrical systems and even where they store their garbage. All buildings to be targeted will be plainly posted on a new website.’

The plan would also create a ‘mobile office’ whose stated purpose would be to address tenant concerns.

On the surface, the above description, gives the impression that the auditing plan could accomplish a lot for Toronto’s tenants. But impressions, particularly ones created by articles that close with glowing endorsements of the auditing plan by one of the City’s larger property managers, can be deceiving.

Let’s examine what we know of the proposed programme point by point:

The auditing programme would target 4 buildings (with 6 units or more) in each ward.

• Channeling department resources to each ward equally seems ludicrous since we all know that some wards have either relatively few rental buildings or generally well-maintained rental stock, while other wards seem chronically plagued with negligent landlords and substandard housing.

• We wonder, under the auditing programme, what will happen to the 5th or 6th worse building in each ward and the tenants suffering in them?

• There is also the issue of transparency in choosing the targeted buildings. Landlord licensing would have made clear to all, as the City’s restaurant inspection system does, just which buildings have not made grade and why. While Jim Hart, has mentioned listing buildings to be audited on a web site, we’ve yet to hear about just how much information we will be given about these properties and the criteria used to choose them.

• Landlord licensing would address Toronto’s buildings and negligent landlords across the board, not just a small number of hand-picked bad buildings. This second point is particularly relevant because the reality we face in this city in one in which property managers and landlords manage or mis-manage multiple buildings and as such, if the City actually cares about tenants, should be assessed based on their entire portfolios/corporate patterns of behavior and not building by building.

The audit programme would charge landlords/property managers $60 to show up for an audit and $60 per hour for the subsequent inspection.

• These fees are much too low and act neither as a deterrent or a true penalty. For large landlords who rake in millions a week, the proposed fees will simply be the cost of doing business.

• More importantly, the programme’s fee structure does not promise relief to tenants. For example, there are no stated escalating fees for non-compliant landlords or cap on the number of inspections before the landlord would face more serious censure. So, under the proposed programme, the City’s inspectors could turn up again and again if the landlord were willing to pay the fees, with no betterment of the situation for the tenants who would continue to pay their rent to the negligent landlord and to live in substandard conditions.

• The City gets its fees with repeated inspections under the auditing plan, but there is no provision to force the landlord to pay for repairs. Instituting an escrow account programme or a policy of adding the costs of repairs initiated by the city to the landlord’s property tax bill would better serve tenants.

• The low fees also ensure the small scope of the auditing programme. If the City charged higher fees they could probably afford to higher more inspectors more quickly than it plans to now and expand the number of buildings they would audit. With landlord licensing, the licensing fees that landlords pay, on top of any penalties they may incur, would be used to fund large-scale, city-wide inspections.

The most troubling aspect of the proposed auditing programme is its conservative perspective:

• The proposed plan lacks a tenant-focus. The audit plan focuses on inspections and not on ensuring necessary repairs and is reactive only to the worst abuses instead of putting the onus, as landlord licensing would, on landlords to prove that they maintain their properties well enough for the City to license them.

• It makes the standard for oversight the worst buildings and in so doing gives a free pass to landlords who maintain their buildings just a little above the four worst buildings in a given ward.

• By focusing on individual buildings, ward by ward, it will fail to recognize and act against patterns of negligence by property managers/landlords across multiple properties and wards.

Overall, the auditing programme seems haphazard and the rationale given for choosing it over the more robust landlord licensing is very feeble.

From The Sun’s article: ‘Asked why not licensing, Hart said if a landlord has 10 buildings and only one is in disrepair, they’d have difficulty trying to decide whether to take away his license to operate one building or the entire portfolio. He added taking away a license could end up pushing vulnerable tenants out on the streets.

“I’ve had the opportunity to explore all the options and I’ve come to the conclusion we don’t need landlord licensing to get fees from landlords,” insisted Moscoe.’

Hmm…other City departments find ways to determine whether licenses and permits should be issued all the time. Why would these determinations be so difficult for Licensing and Standards?

Should we find comfort in Howard Moscoe’s assurances that he knows what is best for us? Maybe we need to take a look at any possible contributions he and other city councillors could have received from landlords and developers.

Laziness and possible backroom deals aside, where do we as tenants go from here?

Given that the Executive Committee will vote on the auditing proposal this Monday (Nov. 10th), here is what we can do:

• Attend the community meeting scheduled for Saturday, November 8th to voice our concerns and support for more effective proposals, such as landlord licensing.

• Show up in force at the Executive Committee meeting on Monday (9:30 AM, City Hall: Committee Room 1)

• Write to our ward councillors, the mayor and the councillors on the Executive Committee to let them know that we want them to amend the auditing programme proposal so that the performance of the scheme, if passed, will be assessed in 6 months instead of the now proposed 12 month period. In other words, the programme would have a probation period and would have to be voted on again in 6 months in order to continue operating.