A Toronto Eviction Notice Tracker Has Been Launched To Help Tenants Fight Back
If you’ve been issued an eviction notice or your landlord has spiked your rent in Toronto, there’s a new tool to help you fight back. Keep Your Rent Toronto and Renovictions Toronto have teamed up to create a new, live Toronto Eviction Tracker.
The resource is aimed at tenants who have been asked to leave their homes or who have been faced with above-guidelines rent increases (AGIs).
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A spokesperson for Keep Your Rent told Narcity by phone on Friday that "it's very hard to fight evictions if you don’t know about them."
He added that it intends to help tenants "organize to fight evictions." Renters can use it to report evictions, connect others who are contesting decisions, and get legal information.
The website, which was launched on Friday, August 7, features a form to fill in to report if you’ve been issued an eviction notice and a live map showing other potential evictees around the city.
“We do not need to hope and wait for politicians and landlords to come to their senses in order to put an end to this crisis,’ reads the website.
“In every neighbourhood across the city, there are people facing the threat of eviction. For months tenants have been organizing and taking action to defend our neighbours."
Not only can you search by evictees, but the tracker also allows you to search by landlord.
This will help Torontonians do their research before signing a rental agreement. You will be able to check if your landlord has given eviction notices or AGIs to previous tenants.
The Keep Your Rent website claims that Toronto’s housing crisis has hit a peak during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Because [rental prices] for empty units are so much higher than [the average current rental price], landlords are trying to remove long-standing tenants and exploit vacancy decontrol to increase their profits," the organization says.
The Ontario rental rules that were put in place at the beginning of the pandemic, including a ban on evictions, are now being lifted, potentially leaving many Torontonians vulnerable.
The provincial government has mandated that tenants who could not pay their rent during the pandemic repay their landlords through a repayment plan.