Renters of Vancouver: “I wasn’t sure how to respond”
> BY KATE WILSON
Renters of Vancouver takes an intimate look at how the city’s residents are dealing with the housing crisis. Tenants choose to remain nameless when sharing their stories.
“I’ve lived in Vancouver nearly all my life. Over that time, I’ve seen the housing market transform.
“I’m 28 years old, and I didn’t move out until two years ago because it just wasn’t feasible for me to do so. When I finally was able to get my own place, the only apartment I could afford was this two-bedroom piece of junk in Hastings-sunrise that I shared with a friend. I loved the neighbourhood—don’t get me wrong, it’s an awesome location—but the suite was terrible.
“It had chunks of carpet missing. It had this really horrible colour on the walls. I found mouse droppings on more than one occasion. The wiring in the bathroom was strange, too. I had an electric toothbrush and I noticed that it wouldn’t charge. Eventually, we figured out that when we turned the bathroom light off, it turned off all the electricity in there.
landlord about getting things fixed; we just kind of thought, ‘That’s how it is,’ and accepted it for what it was. Then the bedbugs happened.
“We were like, ‘Hey, this is horrible; can you do something about this?’ The landlord was very accommodating, so I don’t have any qualms about how he handled it. He let us break our lease, and in the meantime I had to get all my furniture heat-treated and everything was bug-bombed.
“I did absolutely everything in my power to make sure that I got rid of them and didn’t take them with me to a new place.
“We still wanted to find a new spot to live, though, so I looked on Craigslist. I saw an ad for a really cute two-bedroom laneway house in the South Vancouver area. It was totally ideal—there’s a reason laneway houses are so in-demand. I emailed them to make an appointment to look round and they called me back.
“They rattled off a few house rules that didn’t seem out of the ordinary until they got to the end. They said, ‘We’d like to come in and take a look at your current place—the apartment that you’re in right now—so we can judge whether you’ll be a clean tenant.’
“I was a little dumbfounded, so I wasn’t sure how to respond. I said, ‘Oh, okay, sure—let me talk to my roommate and get back to you with a time.’ I hung up, asked her what she thought, and she said it was the most bizarre thing she’d ever heard. I knew of a lot of strange things that landlords had asked my friends before, but I’d never heard of a landlord coming in to inspect a person’s current suite.
“I contacted the Residential Tenancy Branch because I was unsure if what she was asking me was legal or not. I knew I was fairly green to the rental market, and I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t the one who was off base. They told me that what she was asking was very strange but not illegal, because I was within my rights to refuse.
“I was worried when the request came through. I didn’t want the prospective landlord to see our apartment: firstly, because it had bedbugs in it; and, secondly, because the treatments had meant that it had been turned upside down and we were in the process of packing up to move. I didn’t want the landlord to think that I would be bringing bedbugs with me to the new place, because I had taken so many steps to make sure that wasn’t going to happen. Plus, I’m usually a pretty clean person, and I didn’t want them to get the wrong idea.
“We ended up deciding not to let the new landlord view our suite, and we moved out to Burnaby instead. We got a great suite out there and a nice landlord. It was sad that we couldn’t find a place in Vancouver that was within our budget, but Burnaby was fine for a little bit until I found a job that paid better.
“It ended up working out in the end, but it was a rocky two-year period while I entered the housing market. I’ve discovered that if you’re not willing to sign a cheque the day that you view a place, you will definitely lose out to someone who will. People do it because they have to. There’s a sense of desperation with the rental market in Vancouver.”-