BradfordToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication).
SOLO (Small Ownership Landlords of Ontario) applauds councillors of the Town of Bradford for passing the motion to remove barriers and help landlords and renters. We were made aware of the motion from the article in your newspaper.
For the past 5 years, SOLO has been advocating for changes to the Residential Tenancies Act that will create fairness at the Landlord Tenant Board.
Each year, 60 per cent or more of the applications submitted are for non-payment of rent.
To support processing those applications, the government has hired more adjudicators. The full-time adjudicators earn on average $110,000 to $126,000 per year while the LTB charges $186 per landlord application fee.
If there was a system to process non-payment of rent applications administratively, as is practiced in four other provinces, not only would it be financially prudent, it would save housing providers from going into debt, losing their homes in some cases, and stop the rise of housing providers leaving the rental industry completely. Administrative processing is one way to secure housing stock.
According to Statistics Canada, there are more than 927,000 multi-property owners in Ontario. The majority (about 695,000) are homeowners with one investment property. Collectively, they provide more than 30 per cent of housing in Ontario but many of them are getting out of the long-term rental business shrinking the housing supply even more, according to CBC's The National.
A second way to secure housing stock is to provide protection to housing providers in cases where they are renting the basement in the home that they also live in. This section of housing needs a separate category.
It is common sense when an issue arises to be able to resolve it as quickly as possible by permitting this category to be treated similarly as a roommate agreement and call it "secondary suite occupation for owners who live at the property."
SOLO would be very interested in doing a presentation or deputation at the Town of Bradford to highlight the issues and solutions we have identified.
Rose Marie
Board of Director
SOLO Ontario
