Close call for pair in flooded Toronto elevator
TORONTO • Gasping for air as the murky flood waters threatened to engulf him inside a Toronto elevator, Klever Freire could think only of his 13-year-old daughter.
Freire, the CEO of DreamQuii, a tech startup that develops drones, was working late on Tuesday. He was supposed to pick up his daughter to go to a movie, but at 10 p.m., he found himself in his office at a commercial building in northwest Toronto.
A torrential downpour had already begun to flood the city’s streets when Freire and Gabriel Otrin, an industrial engineer at DreamQuii, heard the building’s parking garage was flooding, and they raced down to save Freire’s Honda CR-V. Before their elevator could reach the basement, flood waters began to pour in.
First their feet disappeared, then their knees. In four minutes, Freire said, the two men were up to their waists in water — and it was still rising.
“It started gushing in right away,” Freire said. “To know that the elevator was going to fill up entirely, when we got that realization, that was probably the scariest moment.”
When Freire and Otrin realized they were trapped they screamed, hoping their co-workers could hear. The elevator stalled and the two engineers couldn’t ride it back up. They couldn’t use the elevator’s speakers to call for help either because the system was already covered in water. Within an elevator and below the ground, Otrin’s cellphone had no cell service.
With water levels continuing to rise, they stood on the elevator’s hand rails and pounded on the ceiling panels. They couldn’t use the emergency hatch above their heads to escape because it could only be opened from outside. Otrin’s hands were sliced open as the pair ripped open a 10-centimetre crack in the panels. It was just enough to squeeze Otrin’s phone through and call police.
A tenant who secretly rented out a downtown Toronto condo on Airbnb has been ordered to pay more than $4,000 to compensate for damage done to the floors, shower and kitchen by hundreds of short-term renters.
The case between the landlords, Sanda and Aco Jovasevic, and the unnamed tenant is the latest example of Canadian courts and tribunals trying to sort out the rights of owners and renters as the online room-rental service establishes itself in a tight real estate market.
After making an exhaustive list of broken stove knobs, stained carpets, gouges in the floor boards, an unhinged door, busted blinds, an improbably advanced mildew problem in the shower, and a strange substance that looked like dried glue on the floor, an adjudicator decided the tenant must pay for 80 per cent of all this damage, which led to a final figure of $4,407.87 in the July 24 decision.
The hearing of the case in May followed an acrimonious period last year during which the landlords discovered the tenant had never in fact lived in the condo on Front Street in Toronto’s entertainment district, but rather, had rented it out “dozens if not hundreds of times to travellers as if it were a hotel room.”
The scheme was so established and professional that the landlords even found cleaning schedules indicating the condo was being maintained on a near-daily basis.
The decision of Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board illustrates how difficult it can be for a landlord to learn that something like this is happening, to do anything about it, and to recover compensation for any damage.
The Jovasevics originally applied for an order to evict the tenant, but were given permission to withdraw this request, which the adjudicator believed is part of a legal strategy to sue the tenant in another forum.
This is hardly the only case in which a tenant has secretly sublet a residence via Airbnb and a landlord has struggled to be compensated in a quasi-judicial system designed to protect the rights of tenants.
In 2016, for example, a Toronto landlord tried to evict a tenant from a twobedroom condo being rented on Airbnb, in which guests had sprayed a fire extinguisher in a hallway and set off a fire alarm, which led to a municipal fine. But an adjudicator refused to kick out the tenant, because the landlord waited more than 60 days to file the application after learning about the unauthorized Airbnb use.
That same year, a tenant was evicted from a small bachelor apartment in a non-profit co-op and ordered to pay more than $3,000 because he did not turn over the profit he made to the co-op.
“In this case, the offence is serious,” the adjudicator in that case ruled. “Profiting from renting out subsidized non-profit housing is fraudulent conduct.”