Renovictions, High Vacancy and Booming Rent: Tenants Rights in Montreal

Why are there so many Montrealers with a bad landlord experience? With the high vacancy rate, booming property prices and more – tenants have had a tough time finding and maintaining good quality housing. Local 514 looks at this and what needs to be done to aid tenants.

Cockroaches, rats, mold, unsafe structures, evictions, water damage and renovictions – these are common experiences you hear from tenants in Montreal.

Why are landlords who violate laws, regulations and common sense allowed to continue? 

And at a time when Berliners just voted to expropriate hundreds of thousands of units controlled by the city's biggest landlords, what are we doing to address these issues in a timely way? In this episode of Local 514, we look at the rising rents and poor conditions of housing in Montreal.

This year, Quebec landlords were allowed to increase rent for their current tenants by 2.3%. This was limited from 3% in 2020, newly released guidelines from the the Administrative Court of Housing (TAL, formerly called the Régie du Logement)

In Montreal alone, rents increased by 4.6% between 2019 and 2020. The average rent for available unoccupied units in Montreal rose from $910 in 2019 to $1,198 in 2020. This marks a 30% increase. On Kijiji, rent hikes are seen as much as 8% for listings in Montreal.

How are landlords getting away with this?

One of the methods are renovictions, where landlords will evict tenants on the premise to renovate their property, ultimately exponentially raising the rent afterwards and listing it to a new tenant. This has led to rapid gentrification in many neighbourhoods across the island, notably in Saint-Henri and the Plateau.

But tenants aren’t only affected by rising rents and renovictions, cases where landlords avoid addressing issues or repairs with the apartment, and even use tactics such as gaslighting tenants.

Local 514 speaks to Montrealers who have been affected by these issues, housing rights group and a journalist who uncovered private chatrooms amongst landlords looking to event their tenants.