Nova Scotia’s fixed-term tenancy laws continue to fail Haligonia residents

EWalker and his wife, Krista, thought they’d found the perfect home to raise their five-year-old son, Tristan: three-bedroom, good neighbors, on a quiet cul-de-sac in the Southgate neighborhood of Bedford. All for $2,200 a month. They can take their son to his kindergarten class at Bedford South Elementary. Other children live on the street. Parks and trails abound, from the wooded Old Coach Road Trail to nearby Paper Mill Lake. In the 18 months the Walkers have lived there, Evan has taken up gardening. He even reseeded the lawn.

“It’s quite a nice place to raise a family,” he says, speaking by phone with The Coast.

That is changing quickly. On Saturday, July 1, the Walkers will be forced to vacate the mansion they’ve called home for the past year and a half. Their fixed-term lease is about to expire. The landlord, Evan says, is raising the rent to $3,195 a month — a “total blind side,” he tells The Coast, and a bridge that’s too expensive for what they can afford. (We’ve changed Evan’s name, along with the names of his relatives, to protect their privacy as they search for a new home.)

“[These] guys tell us how great we are for 18 months,” he says. “We’ve never missed a rent payment… now I don’t think we’re going to find it [a place] everywhere.”

The Walkers have been looking for housing for nearly three months, but run into trouble: they can’t afford a down payment on a house or apartment, and rental options are scarce – mostly aimed at singles and couples. .

“I’m usually a pretty hopeful guy, but at some point there has to be some sort of intervention,” Evan tells The Coast.

The Walkers aren’t the only Haligonians struggling. Amid a tight rental market in Halifax, some are calling for the province to protect tenants trapped in fixed-term leases — and crack down on landlords who exploit loopholes to break Nova Scotia’s 2% rent cap to bypass.

Rental properties edged up slightly in June, reports show

According to the latest Rentals.ca reportcomparing the asking prices of vacant units across Canada, average rents for one, two and three bedroom Halifax apartments have risen 9%, 2.3% and a whopping 38%, respectively, compared to the same period last year.

If you looked at a vacant three-bedroom apartment in June, chances are you’d get back $2,768 a month, according to the latest report. Evan says most of the two-bedroom apartments he and his wife looked at range from $2,300 to $2,700 — quite a difference from the 2,800-square-foot home they could rent two years ago for $1,800/month, before them to their townhouse in Southgate.

If you the Canada Mortgage & Housing Corporation Guidelines, which state that for housing to be considered “affordable” should not exceed 30% of your monthly income, a family would need to bring in just over $9,200 a month – or $110,000 a year – to get a newly released three bedroom Halifax apartment. Most households in Nova Scotia made a profit somewhere closer to $71,500 per year in 2020, according to the province’s Finance and Treasury Board. And single-person households earn nearly $36,400.

The math is wrong.

“Nova Scotians are still paid like Nova Scotians,” Evan tells The Coast. “And none of them can afford to live here.”

“Nova Scotians are still paid like Nova Scotians. And none of them can afford to live here.”

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He and his wife are actually doing well, by county standards. Evan works in construction management. Krista works in human resources. The two earn about $150,000 a year between them, but because of his credit score, which he describes as “not terrible, but not good,” he worries property management companies won’t give them a chance. The family has already been rejected for three vacant properties, he says, despite glowing references, co-signers and money to pay three months’ rent in advance.

“You see things in the news all the time of people getting stuck in a situation who have far fewer resources than my wife and I. And it drives me crazy,” he says.

The Walkers would like to keep their son in the same catchment area of ​​the school through the fall, if possible. He made friends. But they know that can be an uphill battle.

“We want to give him some sort of stability — he’s five, you know? And of course, what happens if we get a place and then we have to move in the middle of next year?”

The fixed-term loophole should be closed, lawyers say

Nova Scotia’s governments have attempted to wrest control over housing affordability “never seen in our province” by introducing a rental ceiling in November 2020 and extending it every year since then. Premier Tim Houston made it one of his first moves in his 2021 election to extend Stephen MacNeil’s rent limit through the end of 2023. The county called it an effort to “protect renters” while focusing on housing supply.

“The housing crisis is real and Nova Scotians expect us to act,” Houston said in October 2021. “We will do whatever it takes to make sure Nova Scotians can afford a place to call home. We will not wait. ”

By law, landlords in Nova Scotia with continuous tenants cannot increase rents by more than 2% in a 12-month period. (That changes to 5% on January 1, 2024.) There is one important caveat: The rent limit does not apply to vacant units. And landlords are taking notice.

A common thread connects the Walkers to other tenants on the verge of losing their rental property: Nearly all of the tenants The Coast has spoken to in recent months had fixed-term leases — defined in Nova Scotia’s residential tenancy law as a lease with a predetermined end date, as opposed to periodic leases that run monthly or annually.

“Due to changes in the rental law, the industry has moved away from month-to-month leases and moved to fixed-term leases so that both tenants and owners are on an equal footing with respect to lease terms and options,” says a property manager told The Coast by email last fall.

Fixed-term leases have been incorporated into tenancy law for decades and exist in various forms across Canada. And indeed there are advantages for both tenants and landlords, if both parties agree when they want to end the lease. But the balance of power is far from equal, rent advocates argue, and the widespread use of fixed-term leases is pushing tenants into precarious positions.

Katie Brousseau has a front-line view of how leases have changed in Halifax. A municipal legal officer Dalhousie Legal Aidshe says she hears ‘almost exclusively’ from clients with rental problems – and those concerns are increasingly about fixed-term leases.

As rental options go, fixed-term leases offer “far [fewer] protection” for tenants than month-to-month or year-to-year leases, she told The Coast in October. Unlike periodic leases, which continue when they reach the end of their term (say, at the end of a month or year) , fixed-term leases don’t, meaning tenants have no security of tenure. If a landlord wants a tenant to leave at the end of a fixed-term lease, “they’re not required to have a reason,” says Brousseau.”So it makes it very difficult for people on fixed term leases to know if they’re going to have a continued lease.”

One of the bigger dangers is that tenants are not aware of their own housing problems. Evan says he didn’t think twice about signing a fixed-term lease until it was too late.

“We never thought about it,” he tells The Coast. “We haven’t really seen the stories of these things [when we signed the lease]… we ended up getting burned by a goddamn loophole.

Could Nova Scotia follow PEI’s lead?

Some affordable housing advocates have called for Nova Scotia to tie its rent cap to units rather than leases — which would remove the incentive for landlords to get rid of tenants to get around the 2% (and soon 5%) limit. . Prince Edward Island followed that model for years– although there are also restrictions: rents are not registered with the county, meaning that without a record of a previous tenant’s lease, landlords can theoretically raise rents for new tenants without limit.

So far, changes to the cap structure have been met with indifference in the Nova Scotia legislature. In an emailed statement to The Coast, a provincial spokesperson responded that the government of Nova Scotia is “not considering” the idea at this time.

“We are always working to balance the rights and needs of tenants and landlords,” said the spokesperson, adding that the government is “reviewing” how landlords use fixed-term leases.