Tag Archives: housing inspections

More messy home trainwrecks

Following last week’s announcement of more housing inspectors for the city of Montreal, TVA talks with a housing inspector about some apartment-dwellers who live in inhabitable piles of garbage. The worst cases tend to involve people who have compulsive hoarding syndrome, a mental disorder that causes people to hold on to things with little or no value.

Inspectors alone won’t solve rental housing problems

The City of Montreal has promised to do something about slumlords in the city, who rent woefully substandard and disgusting apartments to poor families. They’re hiring more inspectors to inspect more buildings, and promising to get tough on landlords who are delinquent.

Landlords who don’t make needed repairs will be warned, then fined, and then billed for the work that the city does on its own.

That’s certainly welcome news, but it doesn’t tackle the bigger problem facing both landlords and tenants when it comes to rental housing here: disputes take far too long to resolve.

That problem is with the Régie du logement, a provincial agency that deals with disputes with landlords and tenants. These disputes usually revolve around the same themes:

  • Tenant is not paying rent
  • Landlord is not performing needed repairs
  • Tenant is contesting a rent increase
  • Some other part of the lease agreement has been broken (or is found to have been illegal in the first place)

But depending on the nature of the issue, it might take up to 17 months for the case to be heard at the Régie. This upsets both tenants and landlords who play fair, because in many cases justice delayed is justice denied. When the wait time is longer than the length of the lease in the first place, the wronged parties find it’s easier to just live with the injustice than wait so long for a hearing.

Only a serious investment that will bring down Régie wait times will make a serious difference in some of these cases. It’ll help get rid of both deadbeat tenants and slumlords who rely on the fact that getting rental justice in this province is just too damn hard.

The other problem is that these slum apartments are rented to low-income immigrant families who either don’t know their rights or are afraid to assert them for fear of losing what little they can get at low rent. More low-income housing, combined with serious outreach and information campaigns are needed to solve that problem as well.

I’ll settle for getting my doorknobs installed

A pair of articles in The Gazette today, side-by-side, about slum landlords getting targetted by more inspectors, and a slum tenant couple whose apartment became a giant garbage can.

The way the slum inspectors thing works is this: Right now, the city has 80 inspectors across all the boroughs inspecting buildings. Surprise, surprise, this is woefully insufficient to keep track of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of buildings on the island where people live and pay rent.

The most obvious solution would be to hire more inspectors, and to the city’s credit that’s exactly what they’re doing. But instead of taking on the eight new inspectors (a 10 per cent increase) to the already existing departments, they’re creating a new “task force” that will “work with the boroughs”.

In other words, another layer of bureaucracy. Create a new department to cover up the fact that you’re too cheap to properly fund an existing one.

Government by gimmickry. Doesn’t that make you feel safer already?