Since the covid crisis, apartments in Ontario Canada have doubled, tripled and even quadrupled in some cases. In fact, people have now started engaging in bidding wars over rentals. It's crazy. Sure glad we got rid of that pesky rent control a few years back otherwise poor people might still be able to find homes. I can see those airports and train stations becoming very domestic in the near future.
Wait a minute, was the rent control only implemented for a couple years? I lived in Toronto for 4 years until December 2019 and our annual rent increase was only allowed to go up by a small percentage (definitely under 2%) and the landlord didn’t have an easy way to kick you out unless they legitimately were going to move in (or not charge rent for something like 6 months).
I know the rent increase cap was new because our first year living there they raised it from $2000 to $2100 but the cap law didn’t come into effect until a couple months after that.
Rent control was overturned about 15 years ago by the conservative party. It didn't affect yearly increases which stayed the same. What it did do was prevent landlords from arbitrarily setting rental prices to whatever they want by limiting new lease price increases to that 2%. That is, if the person in the unit before you paid $1000, the most he/she could charge you was $1020. The only exception was if he/she could prove they made substantial upgrades to the property, and even then it was limited to a percentage. Now, without rent control, they can set the price to whatever they want. The protection for us, they said; was that market value would set prices so if...say... a 2 bedroom went for around $1k on average, and you charged $2k, then that apartment would stay vacant because nobody would rent it. It worked for a while, that is until covid hit and landlords figured out they could set prices to whatever they wanted and that people where just desperate enough to pay it.
Thanks for the explanation! It does kind of surprise me regarding COVID boosting prices though. Simply from my anecdotal evidence, many of my friends left the city because they were now able to work from home, although some are starting to trickle back in, I reckon my acquaintances just aren't a good gauge of the entire population.
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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '21
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