Posts Tagged ‘tenants from hell’

Stacking the deck against Ontario landlords

Monday, December 13th, 2010

Stacking the deck against Ontario landlords

Remember the early-’90’s thriller Pacific Heights? A young San Francisco couple buy their dream house and rent out a portion to help pay the mortgage. When slick Carter Hayes — played by an oddly menacing Michael Keaton — rolls up in a Porsche and fancy suit, he seems like the perfect tenant. Twenty minutes later, Hayes becomes a slippery cockroach-breeding con artist who changes the locks on his door and quickly becomes a domestic bête noire.

It’s a made-up Hollywood tale — yet an instructive one. Consider that if Carter Hayes took up residence in an Ontario apartment building, the province’s 2007 Residential Tenancies Act would make it very difficult for his landlord to kick him out. Who knows: He might even be able to claim his cockroaches as protected “pets.”

The law appears to have been drafted on the assumption that all landlords are rich and greedy. Under the Act, a tenant can allow anyone to move into his or her unit indefinitely. So after you sign a lease for, say, a one-bedroom apartment, you can invite your unemployed buddies to come stay with you — forever. The Act does not require you to give names, addresses or references to the landlord. Even if you decide to move out, the scrubs can stay behind until they are formally evicted, which requires a court order … which, in some cases, the landlord cannot obtain because he doesn’t even know what name to put on the eviction notice.

Oh, and if your tenants feel like trashing the apartment à la Charlie Sheen while they live there — or just before they leave — they can. Tenants in Ontario are not required to pay a damage deposit, so if a tenant damages the property and the landlord discovers this when (or just after) the lease is up, the landlord has to spend his own time and money taking them to Small Claims Court. However, since tenants don’t have to give a forwarding address, the landlord can’t serve them court papers. As a result, either new tenants pay for the damage through increased rents, or (as is more likely) the landlord pays out of his own pocket.

Unlike normal contracts, Ontario residential leases are fairly meaningless unless they mirror the specifications set out in the Residential Tenancies Act exactly. For example, many landlords understandably do not want tenants with pets. Even if this restriction is expressly written into the lease, the Act allows tenants to bring in as many pets as municipal regulations allow. Which is lot: The City of Toronto Municipal Code states that a person can keep up to six of any combination of dogs, cats, ferrets and rabbits at any given time in their home.

The only thing worse than the Act is the Landlord and Tenant Board, which appears to be a body set up specifically to help tenants exploit their landlords. For example, even if a tenant just flatly refuses to pay rent, he/she is guaranteed a hearing under the Act. Further, if a tenant contacts the board and says he/she can’t make it to the hearing on the scheduled date, the hearing is postponed. This can happen repeatedly, and in the meantime the tenant continues to live rent-free in the property.

If the hearing ever happens, the tenant can completely blindside the landlord by bringing up random maintenance-deficiency claims. The claim does not have to be true or even make sense, and the tenant does not have to inform the landlord of the “deficiency” prior to the hearing. Nevertheless, on this basis, the board can award money to the tenant at the hearing — which often happens when landlords are trying to evict deadbeats.

Throughout all of this Kafkaesque ordeal, the landlord must play nice and be extra careful not to cause any offence. Repeatedly asking for the rent may be construed as “harassment” or “interference with reasonable enjoyment” of the property.

Roger Ebert called Pacific Heights “a horror film for yuppies.” But most Ontario landlords aren’t rich folks. They’re just small business people trying to get by. But thanks to the Residential Tenancies Act, they spend a lot of their time feeling as though they’re this close to …

Well, I’ll let you watch the movie.
Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/12/07/iman-sheikh-stacking-the-deck-against-ontario-landlords/#ixzz1813fKmLz


The shame of St. Patrick Street

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

It took months to evict the tenants of a crack house. The case highlights the frustration of a the long journey through the Landlord and Tenant Board

OTTAWA — The rental agreement was anything but ordinary.

On Aug. 18, before the Landlord and Tenant Board, Ottawa public housing agreed to let tenants of a crack house stay in the home for two more months so long as they didn’t threaten the neighbours, wreck the place more than they already had, stop leaving needles strewn in the common grounds and clean up dog feces inside and outside of 440 New St. Patrick St. in Lowertown.

They were finally evicted Monday, the agreed date, and two weeks after a 31-year-old mom and addict Melissa Glasner, was found hanging in the basement.

Someone in the home had cut her down from the rope, then called 911 at 6:23 p.m. on Oct. 16. She had been dead for hours and there was nothing paramedics or police could do. The death of Glasner was filed away as a suicide. There were others in the house, but they didn’t notice she was missing until it was too late.

The police know the public-housing unit well because they raided it this summer for drugs and charged a handful of people, but not the tenants, with drug trafficking.

It’s the end unit with the uninviting welcome mat that states: “Come back with a warrant.” (The police did in July).

Inside the public-housing unit, it’s even less welcoming, according to a government official, with dog feces smeared on the floors, holes in the walls and garbage strewn upstairs and down. Mattresses are propped up against the windows in the basement and in the bedrooms upstairs. The windows on the main floor are covered up with bed sheets and cardboard.

Outside, in the yard, there’s not a patch of grass or plants, just garbage — Vodka bottles, pop and beer tins, stolen bicycles — stripped of parts, broken lawn chairs and a derelict barbecue without a propane tank.

Ottawa housing first made an application to evict its tenants in June and got a hearing at the Landlord and Tenant Board in August. The application to evict the tenants of the crack house came after neighbours complained about threats.

It also came at a time when more than 15,000 people — including parents with young children — are on a waiting list for public housing.

Ottawa Community Housing CEO Jo-Anne Poirier said in an interview that the publicly funded corporation acted as quickly as possible to evict the tenants within the legal process. She said delays in the case — it took four months to evict — in part, had to do with the provincial board giving the tenants enough time to obtain legal representation. Once they did, they were allowed to stay an extra two months so long as they obeyed the rules set out in an agreement.

Poirier expressed sympathy for the neighbours of the crack house and said the housing corporation has to “balance the interests of individual tenants and the collective good.”

She says Ottawa housing has only one or two of these drug-house cases each year. A provincial official disputed that, saying it’s more like 15-20. Either way, all agree that one is too many.

And this case highlights the frustration with what appears to be a long journey through the Landlord and Tenant Board, with adjudicators letting a crackhouse stay open four months after Ottawa housing applied to evict, and two months after an adjudicator ruled in favour of the eviction.

Police keep public-housing projects on their radar and have enlisted community liaisons to keep the streets a little safer. But with 440 New St. Patrick St., also commonly known as St. Patrick Street to its residents and their correspondence, it seemed nothing could be done about the threats, noise, the screaming and fighting and the rampant drug use, and the discarded needles and smashed booze bottles in the complex’s common grounds.

So when police raided the drug house in July, some residents literally broke down in tears, and expressed relief and publicly thanked the police, who at the time said the eviction would be imminent.

The councillor for the ward, Georges Bédard, told the press at the time that when citizens report crime, the system works to root out the outlawed underbelly.

Still, the tenants were allowed to legally stay in the crack house until Monday, and long after the July drug raid. That decision had nothing to do with the police. That contract was agreed to by Ottawa housing and the tenants under the authority of Gerald Naud, a member of the Landlord and Tenant Board who signed the decision.

Months later, Melissa Glasner was found dead in the basement.

“Nobody that knows her thinks she had that in her, and nobody thinks she was the kind of person who would kill herself,” said aunt Fran Layton, 64.

“Addicts overdose, they don’t hang themselves. And there were all kinds of people in the house and nobody noticed she was missing?”

Layton described Melissa as a “good person” who cared about family and friends.

“Most addicts are always trying to rip people off, Melissa was always trying to help people,” Layton recalled.

Layton last spoke to Melissa a week before she was found hanging. She seemed in good spirits and gave no indication of any trouble.

The aunt also said Melissa didn’t leave a suicide note.

“If she was trying to get straight and clean, why would she do it? I find it difficult to believe she killed herself,” Layton said.

Melissa was living at a shelter at the time of her death, and friend Tabitha Morris described street life downtown as “Hell in four blocks.”

Melissa’s last moments in that life were spent in the dirty basement of a crack house in Lowertown.

The neighbours in the public-housing project thought the tenants of the drug house would have been gone after the summer’s police raid. No such luck.

In that time — three months — one neighbour was threatened by the tenants. Another neighbour told the Citizen she feared for her young child’s home life with the crack house customers next door “screaming and fighting all night long.” She expressed relief that they were finally evicted and said she wouldn’t miss all the nights the police and paramedics showed up next door.

The unusual conditions that allowed the tenants of the crack house to stay in the public-housing unit included a condition that they pay Ottawa housing $745 — more than half of which was for damages to the publicly-owned home. Other conditions included that the tenants, for the remaining two months before eviction, not “impair the safety on the residential complex of any person” or “remove any smoke detectors in the residential complex” or “dispose of any bottle, needle or syringe in the common area of the rental complex, including the yards.”

The night Melissa Glasner died in the basement of the crack house, neighbours in the project didn’t realize anyone had died next door.

They had seen ambulances at the crack house every other weekend for two years, and so on Oct. 16, when another ambulance pulled up, the neighbours paid little attention.

Gary Dimmock can be reached

at 613-291-2827 or gdimmock@ottawacitizen.com

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/shame … z15MjTA46F

The Bentley-driving tenant from hell

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

By MICHELE MANDEL, Toronto Sun

She’s b-a-a-a-a-ck.

The Bentley-driving, condo-trashing tenant from hell who likes to claim she’s a Persian princess is back before the Landlord and Tenant Board for the umpteenth time.

Call her Mojgan Amir-Davani — or by her other six known monikers: Mozhe Aamere, Mozhe (Mozhgan) Avanni, Mozhe Amerjhajar, Mozhe Sheena Mere, Mozhgan Amere Ghajaar or Amiri Mojgan.

Whatever her alias, her modus operandi is the same: She’s terrorized at least four high-end condo owners in North York, convincing them she’s a successful broadcasting executive only to turn into a destructive squatter who expertly plays the system for months of free rent before she’s finally turfed out and moves on to her next victim.

We first told her tale here in January, of frustrated landlord Jane Randall who rented her investment property to the dark haired beauty only to be stiffed with $12,000 in unpaid rent and thousands more in damage.

Claiming to be suffering from cancer and refusing to move, her dog’s feces spilling off her balcony, the carpets stained with blood and urine, Amir-Davani was brilliantly manipulative.

When Randall repeatedly turned to the tenancy board for help, she was told to wait. And wait some more.

Six months later, she finally left only to move down the street into a Hollywood Ave. condo owned by another small landlord who’s now going through the same horror story.

We’ll call him Frank because he’s too embarrassed to use his real name. Renting out his two-bedroom luxury unit for the first time, the 35-year-old scientist was counting on the $1,920 monthly rent to help pay off his student loans and mortgage.

He figured his realtor had found him the ideal tenant when she arrived in a chauffeur-driven Bentley to sign the deal in February.

She said she was newly arrived from California and provided a reference no one seems to have checked.

Within a few months, his kitchen was damaged by fire, tenants below were complaining about feces dripping from her balcony and her rent cheques began to bounce as hard as a rubber ball.

Amir-Davani didn’t respond to a request for comment.

During a recent inspection, a contractor told Frank it will cost $9,800 to repair the damage so far. He’s also out $2,000 in legal fees and at least $6,000 in arrears.

“It’s hard to sleep some nights,” Frank admits. “The financial cost is one thing. But then there’s the emotional thing: Is she ever going to be out?”

He’s turned to Harry Fine, president of Landlord Solutions and the paralegal who helped evict Amir-Davani from a Harrison Garden condo in 2007.

“I see it every week and my heart goes out to them,” says Fine of naive landlords scammed by professional squatters. “They don’t check references. They don’t do credit checks.”

She finally agreed to move by Aug. 7 as long as Frank waived her back rent and damages. Not surprisingly, the date came and went, with her still comfortably ensconced in his ruined condo.

What she didn’t know is that Fine arranged for her to be confronted by Frank, Randall, and her 2007 landlord when she arrived at her eviction hearing Aug. 9.

“Like a husband walking into a room to be faced by his three ex-wives who had been exchanging stories, the tenant walked into the hearing room Monday morning to find not one but three of her victims,” Fine recalls. “She was furious.”

A landlord and tenant adjudicator gave her until Aug. 31 to leave. But Frank’s hardly home free: As soon as Amir-Davani files an appeal — and she’s vowed to do so — he’ll be back waiting for yet another hearing and yet another eviction date.

“The legal system just takes forever and is so weighted to the side of tenants,” he complains.

Which makes even less sense when this notorious tenant has been the subject of so many eviction hearings.

“She’s been in the exact same hearing room and still it goes on? How does someone get away with that?” he sighs.

“She’s the tenant from hell and beyond.”

http://www.torontosun.com/news/columnists/michele_mandel/2010/08/20/15092061.html