Tenants’ association forced out by high rent
Irony not lost on nonprofit’s chief, who says new landlord hiked costs of office by nearly 30%
Toronto’s foremost tenants’ rights group is being forced to move out of its offices on Carlton St. because a new landlord hiked the rent by almost 30 per cent.
The relocation carries the bitter sting of irony, said Geordie Dent, executive director of the non-profit Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations.
“The entire scenario that we’ve gone through — we get calls about this all the time,” Dent told the Star. “It was basically, pay or we’d be (packing) boxes.”
Having worked in the same location since 2001, Dent characterized the move as an “eviction,” claiming the landlord gave them just eight days’ notice before the organization’s rent was increased by $700 per month. When Dent suggested his group should get more time, the landlord told them to move out within 30 days — by the end of July, Dent said.
The two sides reached a compromise. The federation would pay the increased rent, but would get to stay until Oct. 31. Dent said they are moving to a new office at Carlton and Jarvis Sts. — two blocks away — by the end of the week.
“We were pretty upset with our landlord’s behaviour,” he said.
The landlord is a company called Memnon Management, which owns numerous properties and took over the Carlton St. building in March. In a phone call with the Star, Memnon president Vincent Tangredi defend- ed the rent increase and strongly disputed Dent’s claim that the federation is being evicted.
“That’s absolutely wrong,” said Tangredi. “We increased the rent for everybody in the building because the previous owners had an absent, passive management style (and) there were huge losses that were being incurred . . . We tried to explain all that to them, and all they would look at were the increases.” Tangredi’s lawyer, Stephen Schwartz, added that the federation didn’t have a lease agreement; it was paying rent month-to-month for several years. Schwartz said the federation’s basic rent hasn’t gone up for 10 years, and that Memnon Management was within its right to hike the cost of tenancy in the building.
“Any time a landlord increases the rent, people are upset,” said Schwartz. “The bottom line is that they didn’t want to stay because of the rent, and he (Dent) was free to go.”
Paul Rosenberg, a longtime real es- tate lawyer in Toronto, said commercial landlords aren’t bound by the same rent restrictions as their residential counterparts.
There’s no limit to how much they can hike the rent between lease agreements. And if there’s no lease contract — as in the federation’s case — they can essentially set the rent however they like.
“With commercial, it’s the marketplace . . . It’s you and I trying to work a deal to sell or buy something from each other,” said Rosenberg. “That’s fair game. That’s the capitalist world that we live in.”
Dent said he recognizes and knows this, because of his years of involvement in landlord-tenant disputes. “There’s no rental regulation when you’ve got a lease renewal when you have a commercial landlord,” he said.
Sometimes, he added “this is what you have to deal with.”