Disputed lease leads to a month of no power, forcing the Amherst man to live in an RV

Dwayne Hawkes didn’t consider himself homeless – until he really thought about it.

After a dispute over his rental unit’s lease, the man from Amherst, NS, was without electricity in his apartment for a month, forcing him to move into a trailer on a friend’s property.

“If it weren’t for them, I had nowhere to go,” Hawkes said. “They’re nice enough to let me stay here and that’s a big help right now. But you’re basically homeless.”

Hawkes said that after the power went out to his unit, he spent weeks looking for a new place to live but couldn’t find anything in his price range. After moving to his friend’s house out of town, he lost his job because he didn’t have a car and couldn’t go to work.

Social services say the lack of affordable housing, and problems like renovations and fixed-term leases, are leaving some people homeless for the first time in the city of less than 10,000.

Aidan Kivisto, the manager of Community Development at Cumberland’s YMCA, says his team is struggling to find affordable housing for their clients as housing prices rise.

“We have a serious housing crisis,” Kivisto said. “Vacancy rates are very, very low and rents are very, very high. Our program provides financial assistance to people trying to find an apartment…but it is extremely difficult to find housing because there is simply nothing available.”

The Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation does not track rental market data for urban centers with fewer than 10,000 residents.

But Kivisto said in his experience that the vacancy rate and average rents in Amherst are similar to that of Halifaxwhich saw the highest year-over-year spike in residential rents in Canada between 2021 and 2022.

During that time, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Halifax rose 9.3 percent and the vacancy rate remained around one percent — the second lowest in the country.

Hawkes said when he returned to his hometown two years ago, he got a two-bedroom apartment for less than $1,000 a month. Now he sees rental properties in Amherst for $2,000 or more.

“I don’t think it’s fair to us in our community to have to fight to stay in a place where we grew up,” he said.

Leon Landry, Amherst’s deputy mayor and chair of the county’s intermunicipal poverty advisory committee, said homelessness has become more visible in the area since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think there was always demand, we just didn’t know,” Landry said. “We had people sitting on the couch living in situations that weren’t conducive to safety or health. And for some reason, the pandemic and the results after that sort of exposed that.”

Kivisto said the YMCA conducted the latest census of homeless people in Cumberland County in 2021. This showed that 48 people were homeless, of which 79 percent in some kind of temporary shelter with no prospect of a permanent place to live.

The next census will take place in November and Kivisto expects the number to grow.

According to the Cumberland Homelessness and Housing Support Association Community Hub, they provided services to 39 individuals from May 15 to July 12, with a total of 479 visits.

The problems started with a fixed-term lease

Hawkes had been living in his apartment in downtown Amherst for 18 months when his landlord told him he had to move because his fixed-term lease was expiring and would not be renewed.

According to Nova Scotia Housing Rental Act, a fixed-term rental agreement is a rental agreement “entered into for a fixed period of time, including the day of commencement and the day of termination specified in the rental agreement.” This means that it does not automatically renew every year.

But Hawkes did not know this at the time and thought that if he continued to pay his rent, his lease would change from month to month.

The end date of his lease came and went, and he paid his rent and stayed. But his landlord shut off his power.

Hawkes fought to stay, even as he pulled the trailer out of town. He eventually received a small claims court ruling in his favor telling the landlord to return power to the unit and pay him more than $1,000.

But a subsequent housing rent ruling confirmed that the fixed-term lease was up and Hawkes was evicted. He is now appealing this decision.

He says he has few options when the weather turns colder as he is now unemployed and on welfare.

“Maybe you want to move into a room in an old hotel and it has a stovetop, but you don’t want to live like that,” he said. “You know, I had a comfortable house… what am I going to find next, right? Where am I going to get the money?”

Amherst is working on solutions

The Amherst City Council and its staff have been working to bring more affordable housing and housing support services to the city.

Landry said the city bought a downtown property in a tax sale and donated it to the Cumberland Homelessness and Housing Support Association to create the city’s first emergency shelter. The building will also provide support services and have some affordable units.

The city also has more incentives for developers to build new housing, such as the newly approved housing infrastructure investment policy by the city council at the end of January.

“I think the only real response to that is to try to reduce volatility in the housing market. You know, we have a lot of other issues here,” Landry said.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a discrete, one-size-fits-all answer here. I think it’s an all hands on deck, holistic approach that will get us out of this mess.”