Beware the virus hurricane of flying luggage, evicted tenants

TORONTO — The worst-case scenario often brings out extreme imagery.

Think of walking down a street in Middle America and seeing clothes and overloaded suitcases fired out the windows and then, moments later, the tenant getting hurled out the front door.

With eviction moratoriums and unemployment benefits in the United States about to expire almost simultaneously at September’s end, the extreme imagery of flung clothes and bounced tenants is America’s next crisis because it’s no small number as coronavirus infections rise.

In Ontario, as contrast, the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Doug Ford announced on March 17 that there will be no more residential evictions until “further notice,” and that the enforcement of scheduled evictions would be “postponed.”

That said, once the province’s state of emergency ends, so ends the leniency on residential evictions.

But the drama doesn’t end. Despite the fact Ontario’s controversial Bill 184 is now law, tenant advocates are still fighting it, stating it will lead to mass evictions and seriously hurt Toronto’s working poor and most vulnerable, and not streamline the complicated system surrounding evictions to ease the stress on both the landlord and the evicted.

Tenant advocates remain in protest mode, as evidenced recently by the hundreds of demonstrators who gathered at Queen’s Park and then marched to Toronto Mayor John Tory’s Yorkville condominium.

Once there, a minor clash with police took place, some pepper spray was expelled, but there were no arrests or injuries.

Toronto Police spokesperson Const. Alex Lin told CBC Toronto that “they were pushing our officers (and) trying to gain access to the building.

“(But) they didn’t succeed,” he added.

Housing advocates, of course, have their own picture of extreme imagery and over-the-top left-wing verbiage.

“It is going to be a terrifying bloodbath,” says Geordie Dent, the executive director of the Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations.

In his “terrifying bloodbath,” Dent calculated that renters who fell into arrears in April may have created the justification for some 50,000 landlord applications to the Landlord and Tenant Board, compared to the roughly 4,000 the adjudicator deals with during a typical month.

And that’s just in the GTA. In the U.S., as well, evictions are expected to skyrocket in the upcoming months as jobs in America remain scarce and, as usual, black and Hispanic renters will be the hardest hit.

Of the 110-million Americans living in rental households, 20% are at risk of eviction by Sept. 30, according to an analysis by the COVID-19 Eviction Defence Project, a Colorado-based community group.

That’s 22-million tenants, equal to 60 per cent of Canada’s population.

Some tens of thousands of evictions could be focused, oddly, on the Silicon Valley of Santa Clara County in California where renters are basically facing the perfect storm.

This seems odd because Silicon Valley has the image of young billionaires, venture capitalists and hot cars.

Yet a new study projects 43,490 rental households in Santa Clara are “at the highest risk of eviction” — a rate 16 times greater than a typical year’s worth of evictions because they lost work, and didn’t have unemployment benefits.