Renters getting booted for landlord use

Increase in ‘own-use’ eviction filings indicates growing instability for tenants in Toronto

Your landlord wants their rental unit back — for themselves, a family member or a new buyer. It’s a situation an increasing number of tenants across Toronto are facing, new data shows.

From January to October, Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board received 1,269 “ownuse” eviction filings in Toronto — a sharp increase from the last two years, and on track to surpass the high mark set prepandemic, when a total of 1,274 applications were received in all of 2019.

The figures do not include cases where tenants receive an eviction notice or request and don’t contest it, moving out before their landlord pursues a formal case at the Board. Filing an application also doesn’t guarantee an eviction, but kicks off a process that leads to a hearing.

Still, the rising numbers indicate growing instability for Toronto renters, as the number facing pressure to leave their homes for their landlord, a member of their landlord’s immediate family, a caregiver or a new homebuyer has bounced back from the lows seen during the pandemic. In 2020, there were 864 filings, and last year, there were 762 — the lowest rates seen since at least 2017.

“It creates a tremendous amount of stress,” said Geordie Dent, executive director of the Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations. While an application doesn’t guarantee an eviction, he said tenants often leave due to the uncertainty. “It’s often enough to just push people out.”

Those tenants then face a market where prices have been soaring, he said. In October, the average Toronto two-bedroom listed on rentals.ca cost $3,353 per month, or $2,502 for a onebedroom.

“It’s an absolute nightmare, specifically right now in Toronto … the prices are too high, the amount of vacancy and places available are too low, and again, there is intense competition.”

Dent is among tenant advocates who believe Toronto’s piping hot rental market has driven some landlords to use the own-use process in bad faith, to elicit tenant turnover. While sitting tenants in rentcontrolled units — most units first occupied before Nov. 15, 2018 — are subject to an annual cap on rent hikes, Ontario’s housing laws allow unlimited increases between tenancies.

“There’s now an incentive,” Dent said. “It means you can cash in.”

It’s an assertion echoed by University of Winnipeg researchers Sarah Zell and Scott McCullough, who noted in a 2021 report that own-use evictions could be used to circumvent rent control — by evicting tenants for personal use, then relisting the unit at a higher rate.

But an overall lack of data on evictions in Canada, particularly no-fault or development-led evictions, made it difficult to measure the extent of activity, as well as the impacts on the housing market and society at large, they noted.

Dent suspects the number of eviction applications that reach the board are “dwarfed” by the number playing out informally — the kind where a landlord’s own-use eviction notice, known as an N12 form, is given to a tenant who moves out without the landlord filing what’s called an L2, which starts the process for holding a hearing. According to Tribunals Ontario, the N12 eviction notice was downloaded from its website 75,892 times this year up until Nov. 22.

Tony Irwin, president of the

Federation of Rental Housing Providers of Ontario, rejects the suggestion that a rise in ownuse eviction applications stems largely from landlords trying to get around rent control. “I’m not going to say there’s never a circumstance where that kind of thing can happen,” Irwin cautioned, noting that any landlords using the system to increase rents was doing so in contravention of provincial housing law, and “should be held accountable.”

(Tenants can apply to the board if they believe their landlord has evicted them in bad faith through the own-use process. If proven, an individual landlord can be fined up to $50,000.)

But he believes a constellation of factors have played into the rise. With rents as high as they are, he said some people with investment properties may want to use their secondary residences as homes for their adult children, instead of thrusting them into the expensive market. Early in the year, before the city’s real estate market began to cool, Irwin suggested the rapid pace of homes bought and sold across Toronto may have also contributed to the number of filings.

(Toronto Regional Real Estate Board data shows in March, there were nearly 11,000 houses and condos sold in the city and surrounding areas such as Peel,

York and Halton. While historically high, the total was below the more than 15,000 transactions seen in March of 2021.)

People could have left the city during the pandemic and rented out their homes, he said, only to return this year. He pointed to an aging population, too, with the process legally allowed to be used to move in a caregiver. “There’s all kinds of situations where people need to do this.”

While other kinds of eviction filings are still below pre-pandemic levels, data shows numbers are rising. From January to October, Tribunals Ontario recorded174 eviction applications that included an N13, or a notice that a landlord wants to demolish, repair or convert the unit.

That’s more than the totals for each of the last two years — 168 and 156 — though it still falls about 100 applications short of the high seen in 2019, when 271 such filings were recorded.