Image credit: Colin White

Smart Living Properties, via 211-231 Bank Street Holdings targets Bank Block Tenants with mass eviction

The government of Ontario has steadily eroded affordable housing since 1992. Ontario’s tenancy law includes policies that enable landlords to increase profit from their properties by weakening tenants’ protections. One such policy is vacancy decontrol. Vacancy decontrol allows landlords to increase rent without restriction once a tenant vacates a unit.¹ What this policy does in practice is to create a “financial incentive for landlords to evict tenants, as landlords can considerably increase rent revenues at the turnover of units”.² Landlords are further enabled in this by the fact that provincial tenancy law does not provide tenants with meaningful recourse when faced with eviction.

At the scale of a building or block, increased profit by means of vacancy decontrol may be sought and achieved through mass eviction. There is a significant financial gain to be made by evicting large numbers of tenants who pay lower rents and replacing them with new tenants paying market-rate rents.³ Mass eviction of long-term tenants is especially lucrative given the relatively large increases in rents that can be extracted following turnover of the units.

Aging buildings with low rents are ideal investments for landlords’ profit-maximizing goals.⁴ But housing is a basic necessity. The mass eviction of people from their homes is a violent act. Landlords target low-income tenants and use various tactics to displace tenants, often using divide and conquer strategies to isolate and pressure tenants to leave.⁵ Displacing tenants forces many to experience situations of homelessness, destroys communities and dismantles systems of support. People who are evicted face economic hardship and poor health.⁶

Ottawa has experienced several mass evictions and redevelopments in recent years in the downtown core. Older buildings with low-income tenants have been the target and victims of vacancy decontrol, allowing the landlords to maximize profit from their residential properties. The latest Ontario 2024 Renoviction Report by ACORN indicates that from 2021-2022, the number of N13s filed in Ottawa increased by 545 per cent.⁷ N13s are eviction notices, used by landlords to displace low-income tenants and replace them with higher-paying occupants. They can be filed when the landlord intends to demolish the building, conduct extensive repairs or renovations, or convert the building.⁸

The most recent building targeted for redevelopment in Centretown is the property on the east side of Bank Street between Nepean Street and Lisgar Street. Tenants at 178 Nepean and 227 Bank, who are predominantly low-income tenants, are currently facing a potential mass eviction from their homes. In 2021, a company called 211-231 Bank Street Holdings, bought the property where these tenants live. They submitted a development proposal to the City of Ottawa on January 26, 2023. They served the tenants with N13s notices in October 2023. Some tenants have lived in their apartments on this block for over 40 years and pay under $500 for rent. Market-rate rent in Ottawa for a one bedroom is currently $2043.⁹

Bank Block Tenants have little reason to believe that hearings for them in front of the Landlord Tenant Board would amount to more than a formalized eviction process. Adjudicators are often landlords themselves, or agents of large developers. In fact, Smart Living Properties’ own Alexandre Traboulsi was appointed to the LTB in 2023 and currently sits on the board.

Mass Eviction of the current tenants is pivotal to the ability of Smart Living Properties to maximize the return on their investment. The redevelopment has not been approved by the city yet. Hundreds of Centretown residents have submitted comments to the city’s planning committee expressing opposition to a mass eviction of another block of tenants in Centretown.¹⁰

The current shortage and targeting of affordable and accessible housing is unfolding in a larger context of the financialization and commodification of housing. Rental properties are now a key target of financialization.[^11] The financialization of housing is the process where “financial actors with large amounts of money, such as private equity firms or Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), use housing as a financial instrument for profit”.¹¹ In other words, housing is treated as a speculative commodity, rather than as a basic need.¹²

There are two groups implicated in the financialization of housing: tenants paying rent for shelter and a home, and landowners using housing as an instrument of profit making.¹³ In practice, this is a struggle between classes: those who have enough wealth to purchase property, versus those who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. People are being displaced from their homes so that others can use it as a means of maximizing profit. The law currently helps landlords to do this and does not include any meaningful safeguards for tenants defending their homes.