Fewer pitchforks, better policy

Tenants facing rent increases of 50, 75 or even 100 per cent in several Winnipeg apartment buildings should be taken seriously.

Increases such as these can be devastating for seniors on fixed income or families already stretched by the cost of living.

I’m familiar with the buildings in last Saturday’s article (Tenants slam Alta.-based landlord, protest rent increases, Sept. 26). Before the buildings sold, the same group had owned them for decades. Many rents were around $500 a month, maintenance had been put off for years, and some of the buildings were nearly unlivable.

Unfortunately, this isn’t unusual in Manitoba. Existing housing policy has led to the oldest rental stocks in the country, with tens of thousands of units at or past 50 years old. Keeping them livable will take hundreds of millions of dollars. This is a bad time to make reinvesting in apartments even less attractive and put thousands of construction jobs at risk.

The “above-guideline increase” process isn’t a loophole. It is an essential regulatory component, instituted by government on purpose.

An owner who spends money on capital repairs or increasing operating expenses has a regulated way to prove and recover some of that investment.

Weaken that, and you discourage the exact reinvestment these buildings need.

Capital migrates, and we are in this situation because many investors have already decided Manitoba isn’t investable. The buildings remain here, though, and they keep getting older.

Running an apartment building today means spending on security, fire and life-safety systems, lighting, heating/cooling, and structural components. Tenants feel every one of those things.

Affordability matters, but so do living standards.

If someone who has paid far below market rent for years can’t afford what it costs to run and repair the building properly, that’s a real problem, requiring a compassionate response.

But it’s a social problem at the rent levels and conditions we are talking about. Average rent in Manitoba is just over $1,200 a month — we’re one of the most affordable places to rent in Canada, nothing needs to change.

Where we fall short is the deeply affordable end of the market, and private owners can’t fill that gap. Manitoba’s 80,000 rental units and their owners/tenants can’t be punished for this.

Government has tools to employ — rent supplements, portable housing benefits, social and affordable housing, and partnerships with non-profit and private providers. The private sector’s job is to provide, maintain and improve rental housing.

Both are essential — confusing those roles hurts the people our housing policy is supposed to help.

The tone of this debate is deeply concerning. You can’t ask owners to invest in aging buildings and then make it harder to earn a reasonable return or, in some cases, lose money. Extreme cases shouldn’t be used to rewrite the rules for an entire industry and chase investors out of town.

Housing is complicated. Rent regulation, construction costs, aging buildings, homelessness and social housing are connected, but they aren’t the same problem.

Lately, politicians and advocacy groups have too often boiled these issues down to headlines built on partial facts, and the policy that follows has been rushed, unpredictable and dangerous. This uncertainty puts billions of dollars in housing, and the homes of hundreds of thousands of Manitobans, at risk. We’re reading about this on the front pages today because of years of poor policy and underinvestment.

The process around Bill 13 hasn’t helped. The government announced the standing committee meeting at 4:10 p.m. on the day before the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, leaving one business day of notice before an Oct. 2 meeting. Anyone who works during the day or is home with their kids effectively lost their chance to be heard at committee.

Nobody benefits from advocating a “pitchfork” approach. Tenants, owners, advocates and government should all be at the table, working toward keeping Manitobans in homes they can afford, in buildings that are safe and well maintained for the next generation.

Bryn Oliver is a principal at Capital Commercial Real Estate Services. He has nearly 20 years of experience directly facilitating investment in Manitoba’s rental housing sector.