Landlord hit with $9K fine after booting tenants

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This article was published 09/10/2024 (335 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Winnipeg landlord who kicked out dozens of tenants from his College Avenue apartment block in July has been slapped with $9,000 in penalties after an investigation by the provincial residential tenancies branch.

After tenants at Stratford Hall, a three-storey block at 285 College Ave., were evicted without notice July 12, the Manitoba government stepped in by setting up emergency shelters in hotel rooms and hiring 24-hour security to help residents move back in, as of July 19.

Tenants who returned home reported that furniture, refrigerators and stoves had been taken from apartments.

Since then, the government has served the landlord, Kelly Vasas, with 32 orders, worth $9,000 on behalf of nine tenants, a provincial spokesperson said Tuesday.

Consumer Protection Minister Lisa Naylor said more fines could be levied if more tenants participate in the investigation.

“It’s kind of unprecedented. We had never seen anything like that in the city in terms of how the landlord treated tenants that day,” Naylor said.

Vasas, who took ownership of 285 College Ave. one day before the eviction, is able to appeal the fines. His lawyer did not respond to request for comment Tuesday.

Not only is the $9,000 penalty unusually high, but it’s relatively rare for landlords to be fined in Manitoba. In the 2023-24 fiscal year, four landlords received administrative penalties for breaches of orders, ranging from $1,000 to $2,000. Only one landlord received an administrative penalty in the previous fiscal year.

The eviction at Stratford Hall wasn’t the only housing problem the provincial government has intervened in since taking office a year ago.

In May, after some 250 tenants were forced to suddenly leave Birchwood Terrace, an apartment complex at 2440 Portage Ave., after it was deemed structurally unsafe, the province paid for evacuees staying at hotels after their Canadian Red Cross support ended.

On Tuesday, a provincial spokesperson couldn’t provide the cost to taxpayers to house the displaced tenants since May.

Naylor said the government got involved at Stratford Hall partly because many of the tenants had low incomes and had used the complex as a stepping stone out of homelessness.

She said the decision to intervene in a situation depends on an array of factors.

“As these situations have come up over the summer, we’ve kind of grappled with each situation on a case-by-case basis… But all of these sort of sudden situations of potential homelessness for tenants have also caused us to review the (Residential Tenancies) Act in order to try to find additional opportunities to strengthen protections for tenants.”

Naylor promised the government is looking at ways to better hold bad building owners to account.

“Right now, in the (law), there’s nothing to really hold landlords accountable if there’s some deficit on their part, decisions or choices that they’ve made not to maintain a building, for example,” she said.

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St. Boniface Street Links executive director Marion Willis, who was handed a $672 ticket for trespassing while on site as an outreach worker while tenants at Stratford Hall returned to their units, commended the residential tenancies branch for its efforts but said the $9,000 fine isn’t nearly enough.

“For somebody like Mr. Vasas, (that) is not much more than a rap on the knuckles,” she said. “The consequences to the people that were impacted by this, though, are devastating, and there’s no compensation for them.”

She said some of the tenants have hesitated to co-operate with the branch and that the evacuation has created lasting damage for some of the people Street Links helps support.

“I can tell you that there’s several that we had housed there, that had recovery plans, that have not returned to housing. They’ve returned to encampment living and are back in (using drugs)… it’s a huge setback, it’s a huge loss.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

Every piece of reporting Malak produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.