CREDIT SCORE?
Wow. It's almost impossible for me to make sense of the level of detachment from reality seemingly pervasive throughout society. From policymakers to journalists, it's difficult to understand what vision of the world and version of events they allow to seep through and permit themselves to respond to and extend to the rest of us. The above article is among the many now-hourly examples. In it, we're told the Prime Minister proposed a “Renter's Bill of Rights” last week. By this tool he seeks to enable the timely payment of rent to benefit one's credit score. It’s a policy said to “level the playing field for young renters” and, get this, “particularly those who want to eventually buy a home.”
What?!
The proposal, of course, is exactly, precisely, perfectly outlandish. If that wasn’t bad enough (that it cannot possibly hope to make any sense in any conceivable context — aside from not entirely helping people who don't need the help), the article attempts to conjure up some kind of opposing argument. But it does so while entirely neglecting any of the most basic facts on the ground. Why not, for example, mention median personal or household income? Why not offer the cost of homes in Canada’s major (or minor) cities? Why not any other relevant factor and feature of this conversation?
Though it's certainly a tired discussion, and perhaps because it is so, I’d love to ask the PM or the author of this CBC article what good a perfect credit score is to anyone outside the wealthiest 15% of the population? I'd like to ask them how many Canadians they feel earn below $45,000? We all know, and they must know better, that just for the privilege of applying for a mortgage on an average home (a rather dilapidated and nearly unlivable one, as is the typical owner's preference if you browse Realtor.ca) in any city in this country requires between $140,000 and $260,000 in household income. I would ask them to look at those numbers. And I would ask them what they think the lowest salary for entry into the highest of five income brackets is in Canada? And I would tell them that the last time I looked it was about $134,000 before tax; so, far below the entry point for a typical home. I would then ask what additional or alternative information they have?
Why doesn’t the PM or this senior journalist, or anyone either can muster, walk us through what a baker or unionized high-school teacher or communications coordinator working for the provincial government is supposed to be putting aside each month for a downpayment and for how long? And then why not spell out what, with a perfect credit score, that person can expect to get for a mortgage to then pair with their life savings? (They could even do this just with today’s numbers, not logically projecting into the future any trends of the last two decades.) Then maybe he or she can articulate all the ways this levels (or merely observes or acknowledges) any sort of playing field?
IDEAS THAT COULD POTENTIALLY, SOMEHOW, PERHAPS MAKE A DIFFERENCE
Aside from immediately building three more cities the size of Saskatoon or Victoria (just to accommodate some of the most recent arrivals and those who will join us tomorrow), there are some things you could do if you really wanted to level the playing field. As someone who has put in almost three decades of renting in all variety of units, dozens of them, and all over the globe, I can safely say I've seen what's on offer out there and that I feel pretty well-situated to riff on this topic.
To start, why not accept the mountains of research we have on short-term rentals. Why not admit that we’ve known for at least a decade that Airbnb and like services destroy, literally destroy, cities? It was an experiment run by millions of people in cities around the globe and for a decade. And the results have been astonishingly universal and conclusive. Short-term rentals should at the very least be severely restricted, as they now are in cities like New York, if not prohibited entirely. At minimum, that would make available so many recently lost housing units, a staggering number of which we accepted without contest despite knowing them to be illegal.
And then I would go a step further (or perhaps twelve) and eliminate the “mortgage helper”, so called; or, rather, I would instantiate it for the first time ever by making renters the new lenders, which, of course, they always have been. So, any portion of a mortgage being covered by a tenant’s rent would become a contribution realized upon the sale of the property. So if you pay off 7% or 65% of my mortgage, the equivalent would be your claim on the value of my (or, rather, our) home. That, to my mind, would be an actual, and vaguely coherent, levelling of the playing field.
I would add to those amendments a way to ensure that if someone wishes to rent a property they be required to provide accommodation and rental terms that they themselves would live with if they were the tenant. That would be an even bigger game-changer than all of the above in my mind. Below are just some of the common scenarios myself and folks I know have and are currently weathering.
Many, if not most, apartments are rodent and/or insect infested, most certainly beyond anything any landlord would tolerate for themself or their family. Along with that, many places have non-functioning appliances and fixtures. For instance, it's not uncommon to come across kitchens with no ventilation of any kind, neither a window to crack nor a proper vent, or only partially working stoves. Occasionally a rental unit even sports both of these luxury features, which was the case in one of the last places I rented: a lovely house in a lovely neighbourhood with no hood vent and a non-functional oven with partially working stove. Just $1,800mo!
On the topic of appliances, most rental units don’t have dishwashers while every home on the market does. Isn't that odd? It's almost like we have a tiered society. Similarly, while every home appears to have laundry, rental units almost never have in-house laundry. Why? And buildings with communal machines, when they have them, tend to have positively insane usage terms and fees; things like bizarre and intractable schedules and charges so high the landlord could put a new machine in a new unit every month on just the profits from washing alone. Me, I washed my clothes in a Rubbermaid bucket for years, because there were no machines in my building and no laundromats anywhere nearby. Occasionally it was because I simply could not find the money to run machines — ones that were filthy or broken or would get stopped mid-cycle by other tenants, who would swap out my clothes for theirs and dry their undies on my toonie. This sort of thing is perfectly common regardless of context.
It’s also not uncommon to rent a unit without basic necessities such as internet access. In two of the last units I rented this was the case. One of them required that, if I wanted “high speed internet” two decades into the 21st century, I would have to call the ISP who would then run cable from three blocks away into the house I was renting. And even then the line was not fiber. In the other rental unit, despite being in a downtown residential building, I was told I could not, at any cost, not even with a bribe of $5,000, bring in a modern internet connection. And the unit was on the ground level of a concrete build that had no cell reception, so just tethering a computer to a cell phone with a data plan was not an option… Have you ever seen or heard of a landlord who has no internet access? I haven't.
Aside from basic amenities and what landlords consider necessities in their own homes, many, if not most, landlords have positively outlandish expectations and requirements of their tenants. I lived with two other people in the basement suite of a house, for example, in which the Indian landlord prohibited the cooking of Indian food while also strongly discouraging us from having guests, among other things. Just imagine dictating the terms of what someone else, neither a child nor your own child and someone paying you rent, may eat! Other landlords will seek to dictate the times of your comings and goings, what lights you may use and when, or what pets you may or may not have — none of which, naturally, are ever accompanied by any reference to law or reason. Countless things of this sort really are the norm, even for middle aged renters with fantastic references, not the “young renters” or “students” that the article and our Prime Minister seems so concerned with.
Doing all the above would still leave out many significant gaps not covered by current legislation and that desperately need addressing. For example, I was recently kicked out of three rental units in just four years, each time due to the landlord selling. While it's highly unlikely many others have or will experience such, I can't imagine anyone wishing to live in a place where this sort of thing is possible and could happen to them. And there are just countless other experiences of this kind, more than merely inconvenient or costly, that are almost exclusively put on tenants due to Canadians only, yes only, having ever been concerned with the well-being of landlords.
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