Report finds Vancouver has highest rental eviction rate in the country
Kevin Griffin
The Vancouver Sun
The first-ever national report on evictions found that Vancouver has the highest eviction rate for tenants at 10.5 per cent
Alawyer with the housing law clinic at Vancouver’s Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre said one of the reasons why B.C. has a higher eviction rate is that it’s easier under provincial legislation for a landlord to evict a renter here than in Ontario. Photo by Kim Stallknecht /PNG
Metro Vancouver has a “significantly higher” eviction rate for renters compared to Toronto and Montreal, according to a University of B.C. report on national eviction rates.
The report being released Tuesday found that the eviction rate in Vancouver was 10.5 per cent during a five-year period ending in 2018, compared to 5.8 per cent in Toronto and 4.2 per cent in Montreal.
For B.C. as a whole, the eviction rate was slightly higher than Metro Vancouver’s, at 10.6 per cent.
“In relative terms, B.C. is a key centre of evictions in Canada,” a news release about the report says.
A rental housing advocate connected evictions to homelessness by saying that when poor people are evicted, they are more likely to end up on the street because they can’t find anywhere affordable to rent.
Craig Jones, co-supervisor of the report, said one of the issues that kept coming up among housing researchers was how little was known about evictions across the country.
He said for the first time, researchers were able to look into nationally representative data collected from 65,377 Canadians in the 2018 Canadian Housing Survey.
Asked why Vancouver was described as having a “significantly higher” eviction rates than other major urban areas in the country, Jones said he was just presenting the information.
“I’ll let other people comment on their thinking on why this is happening,” he said in an interview. “Unfortunately, the data does not tell us why the rate is higher (in Vancouver) than elsewhere.”
Jones said the study isn’t based on court filings or other administrative data.
“It’s based on a large survey of people reporting on their experiences of evictions,” said Jones who is research coordinator at UBC’s Housing Research Collaborative. “Some of these might not be legally called evictions.”
He mentioned his own experience of being evicted twice in a five-year period. The first time he was served an eviction notice, but in the second, he moved out before receiving an official notice because of incentives that included covering moving expenses.
“I would count that as a forced move — even if in strictly legal terms it was not,” he said.
Metro Vancouver had 348,700 renter households, or 58.2 per cent of the 599,360 in B.C., according to the 2016 census.
Jones said in all likelihood the national survey data undercounts the number of people who are evicted because it excludes anyone who is homeless as the result of an eviction.
The report’s other co-supervisor is Andrea Craig, an assistant professor of economics at UBC. Silas Xuereb is the researcher.
Zuzana Modrovic, a lawyer with the housing law clinic at Vancouver’s Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre, said she wasn’t surprised by the “bleak numbers” showing a much higher eviction rate for Metro Vancouver.
Modrovic said one of the reasons why B.C. has a higher eviction rate is that it’s easier under provincial legislation for a landlord to evict a renter here than in Ontario.
She said the Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre has called on the provincial government to change legislation so the onus is shifted in all cases from tenants who currently have to file for dispute resolution onto landlords to make applications for evictions.
Eviction, Modrovic said, can lead to homelessness for people living at the lower end of the income scale.
“The simple answer is when poor people are evicted, they often end up homeless,” she said. “Sometimes temporarily, sometimes for a longer period, because there just isn’t anywhere where they can rent that they can afford.”
Understanding Evictions in Canada through the Canadian Housing Survey also found that while Indigenous people are at a higher risk of eviction, the data didn’t point to the same kind of discrimination happening to Black Canadians.
“Men, and especially single fathers, are especially at risk of eviction in Canada,” the report says. “Evictions are also more common among households with children and renters aged 45 to 54 than among younger adults and seniors.”
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