Tenants could be looking at a 2.6% increase in their rent come next year.
Jen Casorso with Urban Matters in Kamloops says it is a better figure than what we we’re looking at before the government tied rent raises to inflation. “Previously rental increases would go with inflation plus an additional 2%. So you would have been looking at potentially 4.5% or 4.6% in 2020. One of the measures the province put in place was to cap it at inflation and so it is actually lower than what it could have been had that measure not been in place.”
Despite 2.6% being lower than say, 4.5%, it can still have a significant impact on how people live month to month. “An ideal situation in communities to live affordably, you shouldn’t have to pay more than 30% of your income. Even though 2.6% is less than what it could have been, it is still going to be an impact. They’re going to have to look at their budgets and are going to have to sacrifice another quality of life or basic need.” She notes that, that isn’t the case for a lot of people here in Kamloops. “From data through the rental housing index, in Kamloops we’ve got just over 10,000 renter households and of that, we know at least 47% of them are paying more than 30% of their income on housing and at least 22% of that population are paying more than 50% of their income toward housing.”
Legal Advocate with the Tenant Resource and Advisory Council Rob Patterson says there may be better ways to regulate the way rent increases are permitted. He says there are arguments both for and against the current model. “Landlord groups argue that allowing rent to rise with or above inflation allows landlords to reinvest in their properties. However, under the current scheme landlords do’t need to perform any of that reinvestment. So, no repairs or expansions or upgrades in order to increase the rent. So there’s nothing that directly incentivises that.”
He thinks it would be valuable to look any models where a landlord can only issue rent increases where there aren’t existing problems with their rental unit because we don’t think its fair to ask a tenant to pay more for a unit that they have been asking their landlord to fix for months or even years.
