‘Ghost’ kings of Kensington play havoc with tenants
Renters say landlords are forcing them out and turning apartments into Airbnb ‘ghost hotels’
What remains of 38 Kensington Pl. is still accessible through a short alley, in the heart of Kensington Market.
Cleansed of its graffiti and missing most if not all of its original tenants, the lowrise building is little more than a shell of what used to be a vibrant artist and student community.
Most of the renters may be gone, but tourists are welcome to spend the night in renovated portions of the old apartments through the popular homesharing site Airbnb.
“My friends and I painted these stairs,” said former tenant Chris Leithead, climbing the stairwell to view an Airbnb unit at 38 Kensington Pl., inside one of the three-storey apartment buildings where he used to live.
“We ripped up the carpet on the stairs and painted it,” said Leithead, 26, a visual artist.
The Star went with Leithead to see a unit rented by a member of the Fairbnb Coalition, a group that was formed to draw attention to the impact Airbnb is having on affordable housing.
A key issue for the coalition is the rise of ghost hotels — when a building is cleared of tenants so owners can rent out the apartments, creating what is essentially a hotel. Existing city bylaws do not allow landlords to arbitrarily transform permanent apartments into short-term rentals, or create pop-up hotels, but exactly how Airbnbs can operate in Toronto is under debate at city hall.
Leithead moved into 38 Kensington Pl. in the spring of 2015 and about a year later his building was one of five Kensington properties sold to Claude Bitton.
Tenants allege that Bitton and his employees went knocking door to door, asking for illegal rent hikes, and used threats of eviction and intimidation tactics to get them out.
Bitton, in 2016, told the Star he was seeking fair market rent and it was his staff who were being intimidated. He did not respond to questions about the current use of 38 Kensington Pl.
The Star did reach paralegal Peter Balatidis, who recently represented Bitton at the Landlord and Tenant Board for a different Kensington property. “That is a heck of an accusation that you are making,” said Balatidis on Friday, when told the Star wanted to confirm with his client if any part of 38 Kensington Pl. was being used as an Airbnb.
Balatidis responded to questions sent to Bitton on Monday, about 38 Kensington Pl. and a decision following the tenant board hearing, stating in an email that his clients have “no interest in communicating with you or with any other media outlet” and any future inquiries should be sent to him.
A spokesperson for Airbnb said Monday: “Airbnb is opposed to the practice of evicting tenants in order to list a property on our platform and we believe any home sharing regulations should uphold this principle. We are currently investigating this user.”
In Toronto, the rising use of Airbnb has resulted in proposed regulations for short-term rentals. The latest draft was presented to the mayor’s executive committee Monday. Public consultations will follow, with a final report due back later this year.
Included in that draft is a rule that people can only offer up Airbnb rentals in properties where they are the principal resident.
Thorben Wieditz, with Fairbnb, said the new regulations are needed to prevent property owners from cashing in on evictions.
“Landlords are incentivized, by and large because of a lack of regulations, to dispose of residents,” said Wieditz. “Any potential rental unit should be on the long-term rental market.”
The unit the Star viewed was rented on Airbnb for $127 a night, plus $65 cleaning and $24 service fees, for a total of $216.
The listing boasts that up to four can sleep in a unit in a building that has undergone recent renovations, in a neighbourhood with “art and famous graffiti artists everywhere,” full of food and bohemian charm. Dominique Russell, chair of Friends of Kensington Market, said people who give the market its flavour are being squeezed out. Russell also toured the unit with the Star.
“The life of Kensington Market is the people, so to advertise that it has all these interesting artists, well, it doesn’t anymore because you have kicked them out,” she said.
On Monday, nine units at Kensington Pl., which tenants say were created from three larger apartments, were on offer on Airbnb, although the address is not listed. All are advertised as the home of “Marina,” “originally from Moscow,” who has lived in Canada for two decades and is a “huge fan of the arts & literature.”
Leithead showed the Star part of what used to be unit 202.
Former tenant Jessica Pisarek, 30, identified part of her former apartment inside unit 203 through online listings sent to her by the Star.
She lived in the building for six months, half the time of her lease, before the building was sold.
“It is not sustainable because you are going to lose the vibrancy of the community,” Pisarek said. “It is a catch-22. You will make money in the short term, of course, but you are losing a lot of the culture and the community members who make the neighbourhood what it is.”
Leithead and his roommates left in the fall of 2016, after the rent hikes and threat of eviction became too stressful, he said.
He said the biggest change to his old home was a wall separating parts of the second floor and a new stove to create a separate kitchen. Some things remained the same. “That is the shower curtain we bought and left behind,” he said.
Some tenants stayed and applied to fight the rent hike.
Anders Yates, who has lived at 35 Kensington Ave. since 2013, said Bitton tried to raise their rent from $2,350 to $3,500, and when they said no, he told them he considered them trespassers.
Last week, an adjudicator determined that Bitton “made several requests for unlawful increases in rent” to Yates and his roommates and ordered they be given an abatement of $1,175.
Yates described the decision as heartening, but more of a moral vic-
“It is really validating . . . that these actions that felt so wrong that our landlord was undertaking, that they were in fact wrong.” ANDERS YATES
tory. “It has been a long and frustrating ordeal, so it is really validating to have it confirmed by somebody in a position to know best that these actions that felt so wrong that our landlord was undertaking, that they were in fact wrong,” he said.
They could still lose their home. Bitton has applied to have the apartment taken over by one of his children, Yates said. Moving a family member in is one way a landlord can legally evict somebody from a property. A date for that hearing has not been set, Yates said.
Leithead found a new apartment close to the market, but said rising rents and what he sees as a lack of penalties for bad landlords have left him feeling hopeless about his future housing prospects.
“I don’t know if I can continue to live in the city I grew up in because this is happening all over,” he said.