Hamilton landlords want a rebrand
‘Rental housing provider’ group’s preferred term
A group of property managers and apartment owners in Hamilton wishes to be called landlords no longer, arguing the term, haunted by its medieval history, has too many negative connotations.
“It just has a bad ring to it,” said Arun Pathak, president of the Hamilton District Apartment Association. “It’s the two words together: Somebody lording over the land.”
The term landlord conjures an image, Pathak said, of a callous and wealthy man collecting cheques each month and doing little else. But in reality, he said, “there’s a lot of work.” “We’d like to try and find a term that works better,” he said. As of now, the group is offering this: rental housing provider. It works, said Pathak, because it isn’t genderspecific and points out they’re providing a service. “Hopefully, over time it will catch on.”
The group has discussed this rebranding for several years, and did so again at a meeting last week of its 250 members. Changing the name landlord has become a small facet of their plan to deal with a public relations crisis.
Property owners, Pathak said, have been vilified after several high-profile landlord-tenant disputes in the area. (Most notably, a renters’ strike against an apartment complex in Stoney Creek has dragged on for months, with the Hamilton Spectator reporting on a neighbourhood barbecue in August where children beat a pinata emblazoned with the face of the executive behind the rent increases.) “It’s been a very one-sided story,” Pathak said, stressing that trying to change the term landlord was a minor part of the group’s public outreach plan.
“It’s not a big rich landlord who’s doing all this,” he said. “A lot of it is just a guy in the street, a guy who’s been working at his other job for a long time.”
At least one property management group elsewhere in Canada is sympathetic to Pathak’s argument, though it’s unclear if his proposal to abandon the term would garner much support around the country. Representatives of associations in B.C., Saskatchewan, Quebec and Nova Scotia told the National Post that they don’t consider landlord to be a dirty word.
“It’s been ingrained in our industry for a long time now, and I don’t see the real reason for changing it,” said Kevin Russell, the executive director of the Investment Property Owners Association of Nova Scotia. Chanda Lockhart, Russell’s counterpart at the Saskatchewan Landlords Association, said any name change would be futile because it wouldn’t convince the public to follow suit. “Everyone would still refer to us as landlords,” she said, adding that landlords should strive to overcome negative stereotypes by focusing on the job at hand — “providing good customer service and quality rentals.”
On the other side, Manitoba’s Professional Property Managers Association deliberately eschews the term landlord because they feel it isn’t the most accurate summation of their role. “We manage apartment buildings. We don’t lord over land,” spokesman Avrom Charach said, noting that the PPMA would support Pathak’s idea.
The term landlord is likely more than 1,000 years old, with the first known use of its Old English antecedent — landhlaforde — in 1000 AD, according to the Oxford English dictionary. But the concept of the landlord, as we understand it, starts in England after the Norman conquest of 1066. And the version of the landlord-tenant relationship that William the Conqueror brought from continental Europe stems from the cultural traditions of the Roman Empire.
“I can see why they think it’s a loaded term,” said Andrew Moore, a PhD candidate in medieval history at the University of Waterloo. Moore studies records kept at English manors during the 14th and 15th centuries, detailing disputes between medieval landlords and tenants. In those files — the medieval equivalent to civil court documents — the landlord is referred to as the Latin dominus, meaning lord or master (among other things).
The dynamic has virtually no resemblance to the modern version, he said: “The medieval lord had far more power over the daily lives of the tenants than in a modern sense.”
Starting after the Norman conquest, a king generally
WE MANAGE APARTMENT BUILDINGS. WE DON’T LORD OVERLAND.
bestowed land on a nobleman in exchange for fealty and military service; that nobleman gave land to tenants in exchange for rent by way of crops, livestock, or money. There appears to have been two extremes of the medieval landlord: one as the linchpin in an idyllic rural harmony, the other a domineer who approved marriages between tenants, demanded free labour and took the best animal from a family when their head of household died, as a payment for settling the dead man’s affairs.
“This medieval concept of the landlord who has a corrosive relationship with the tenants may never have existed in Canada, and certainly not since Canada became an independent country,” said Shami Ghosh, assistant professor of medieval history at the University of Toronto.
“I fail to see how that’s going to affect the image in Hamilton right now.”