In the spring of 2002, things were going pretty well for me and my young family.
Mary and I had been married for only about 7 years. We had two children: a 3-year-old toddler and a baby who had just turned 1.
I graduated from Lethbridge Community College (now Lethbridge Polytechnic) with a diploma in multimedia production. The job I had as a practicum student was extended for a year as a contract position. That gave me work straight out of school, and in the spring of 2002, it had just been made into a permanent, unionized position. That meant better pay and—for the first time in my life—health benefits.
We were living in a pretty nice 3-bedroom duplex, which included a family room, 1.5 bathrooms, a garden, and a laundry room. Until we moved into this home, we always had shared, coin-operated laundry appliances.
Plus, this home was walking distance to my new job, to the grocery store, to our doctor’s office, and to our church. It was pretty centrally located for what we needed at the time.
The house actually belonged to friends of ours, who used to live there. When they moved to Ontario, they asked us if we wanted to moved it. We were living on campus at the time, but with me dropping out of school, we needed a new place to live. It worked out pretty conveniently for us.
Two years later, our landlords experienced some financial difficulty. They decided to sell their house to help them get back on their feet. We did not think much of it at the time, as we just assumed that whoever bought it would simply keep us as tenants.
Well, it turns out that we were told that the new owner wanted to instead use it for his daughter, who was apparently going to university, which was pretty close to our place.
As an autistic person, I took him at his word, and we found a new place to live. Unfortunately, it was no longer walking distance to my job, our doctor, our church, or groceries. We lived there for almost 4 years before buying the house we live in now.
In the 20 years or so that have passed since we moved out of that duplex, I have since found out that telling current tenants in a property you just bought that you need to use the property for family members is a common tactic to evict tenants so they could charge more to new tenants. Often they never even intent to have family live in the home.
Sometimes, the new property owners will include cosmetic changes, such as new paint or shampooed carpets, to justify the rent increases.
Kicking out tenants to makes physical changes to the property and then increase the rent is known as renovictions.
In Alberta, renovictions are illegal for fixed-term leases (unless the lease explicitly allows for them).
For rental situations without a lease, they are allowed for only major renovations. Even then, the property owners must provide proper notice and how much time the tenants have. Failure to do so could potentially result in a $10,000 fine.
Tenants who think that the property owner is not planning renovations that are major have the option to file a dispute with the Residential Tenancy Dispute Resolution Service.
