No heat, no hot water, and no lease? Some collective housing renters don’t have renter protections

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Splitting utilities and rent with a group of people can be an attractive solution in Vancouver’s tight housing market, but not all living arrangements are protected by B.C.’s tenancy laws.

A group of renters in one collective housing arrangement found this out the hard way: they say a woman holding the lease kicked them out with three weeks notice, turned off the heat and hot water, and, in some cases, refused to return their damage deposits.

RELATED: Vacancy rate holds, rents continue to rise across Metro Vancouver: report

Genene Grant lived in a collective house in Cambie Village for five months before she moved back to Calgary this April. She says the woman holding the lease, who lived with them, also put a lock box on the plugs for the washing machine and dryer so the other roommates couldn’t do laundry, and changed the WiFi password, although these utilities were included in the rent.

“She decided that we didn’t deserve to have heat,” she says. “There was never any heat in the house for three weeks…I just felt betrayed, just scared that you’re going to be kicked out of the house, that you’re just not going to have a place to live.”

She says she was afraid police would come and kick her out of her home because she had “zero rights.”

Grant was shocked to learn she didn’t have any protections with the Residential Tenancy Branch.

“Vancouver seems like such a great city, but the housing is so brutal there. The fact that I was in a house and had zero rights, it was beyond me,” she says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Tenant advocate Lorna Armstrong with Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre says people who are sharing a property with someone named on the lease, but are not named on the lease themselves, cannot have arbitration with B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Board.

“If you are a tenant who rents an entire property from the landlord, and you, in turn, rent out rooms to other people who are not on the tenancy agreement with the landlord owner, the Residential Tenancy Branch has denied jurisdiction over the relationship between a tenant who rents a property and allows people to move in and rent, perhaps, rooms or part of that unit from them,” she says.

RELATED: Developers warn stronger controls in B.C. could lead to rental housing shortages

True subletting, she says, is when a tenant gets permission from a landlord to sublet, and moves out of the unit for a period of time. That would involve having a written agreement with the sub-letter to rent out the unit in their absence for a specific period. Those tenants are can have arbitration at the RTB.

From 1988 to 2006, she says the board could consider this kind of arrangement to be a tenancy, and covered under the Act. But now people in these semi-subletting arrangements do not have adequate protections, she says.

“I believe that this group of people should have the opportunity to go before an arbitrator to see if there is a formal agreement to rent, or if it is just a casual arrangement,” she says. “I would suggest that where a tenant rents out rooms to individuals, and offers the use of the common areas… — that if it was an agreement whereby it was going to be month-after-month-after-month at a certain rate of rent, if a deposit was taken, if there are rules and issues discussed between the parties — that those parties should have an opportunity to be served by the Residential Tenancy Branch.”

 

Top Stories

Top Stories

Most Watched Today