Students in a fourth-year sociology class at Carleton are creating a podcast to raise awareness on tenant rights and financialized landlords in Ottawa in light of the Heron Gate evictions.
Heron Gate, a rental complex in south Ottawa, was demolished in 2019 to build new apartment buildings. A human rights complaint from former Heron Gate residents accusing the developer of racial discrimination is currently before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.
Financialized landlords are landlords who make a profit by selling property or turning over units and jacking up rent.
The class, SOCI 4170: Community Engaged Sociology, offers students the opportunity to get out of class and apply what they learn to real events. The podcast, created by a group of nine students, is one of three ongoing projects in the class.
The group said they chose to create the podcast because it’s an easy way to spread information.
“Our goal is to create a podcast to educate people about certain terms that are used [in housing] and what’s going on so that tenants don’t end up in a position like the one that we’ve seen at Heron Gate Village in Ottawa,” said Hannah Braha, a fourth-year sociology student in the group.
Joshua Hawley, a teaching assistant for the course, explained landlords send out demolition evictions to kick tenants out even when there might be nothing wrong with the building.
Timbercreek Asset Management, which owns the Heron Gate property, maintains the buildings at Heron Gate were falling apart.
The purpose of these evictions is often so the landlord can remodel the neighbourhood, as with Heron Gate, which former tenants allege was purposely run into the ground to pressure them to leave.
“People ended up moving so the landlord got what they wanted in the end, which was to demolish the homes and they’re going to build luxury high-rise rentals,” Hawley said.
According to Hawley, traditional landlords profit from collecting rent, while financialized landlords do not profit exclusively from rent collection.
“It sounds sort of counterintuitive, but they don’t really care about rent collection,” Hawley said. “It doesn’t affect their bottom line because they’re selling and trading their properties on the market as assets.”
Over the last two years, more public awareness has been paid to evictions and housing crises for low-income individuals, according to Hawley. Still, Hawley said COVID-19 revealed more housing struggles that low-income families are facing.
At Carleton, the Minto Building is named after Minto Developments, a large financialized landlord.
“They’re one of the heaviest hands when it comes to evictions during COVID,” Hawley said. “These big financialized landlords rely on evictions and tenant turnover to maximize return on investment.”
According to Hawley, knowing your rights under the Residential Tenancies Act can put pressure on landlords and hold them accountable. However, Hawley said this isn’t always enough.
“There [is] so little recourse through the legal system for tenants that it doesn’t really help you, so that’s what we’re trying to talk about in this course,” he said.
For the podcast, the group has started conducting interviews to get different perspectives on the issue.
Yoyo Chan, a fourth-year law and sociology student and member of the podcast group, said she interviewed a woman who works with a multi-faith housing project that helps people in housing crises.
“These projects are genuinely helping people to connect with others and to build relationships that way, even though it is a bad situation,” Chan said.
Fifth-year criminology student Aiden Payne, also involved with the project, said they hope the podcast can inform people about the issues faced by the former residents of Heron Gate and all tenants.
The group’s website, Landlords of Ottawa, lists financialized landlords in Ottawa and the buildings they own. The website was started by another group of students during a previous semester and is being expanded this semester by the current research group.
“There are different legal and social resources that tenants can access to understand more about their rights and what they can do when they’re in a difficult situation or facing eviction,” Chan said.
The podcast will be available online at the end of March or early April.
