'So relieved': 91-year

91-year-old woman celebrates as Ontario tribunal rules eviction order 'defective'

Sylvia Berk received eviction notice last year

A 91-year-old woman served with an eviction notice at a seniors’ apartment building in Windsor is celebrating after a tribunal ruled that the notice is “defective.”

“I was so relieved and so grateful,” says Sylvia Berk, whose case before the province’s Landlord and Tenant Board has spanned months and required multiple hearings.

Berk is one of dozens of tenants at the 71-unit I.L. Peretz House in the city’s downtown core who say they’ve faced sharp rent increases. Her case has set the stage for a broader showdown between the residents, many of whom say they are on fixed incomes, and the landlord, who says the previously low rents combined with rising costs are driving the increases.

“This case affects more than just the tenant at hand,” says Ghadeer Jwad, owner of JLaw Solutions and a paralegal who represents the tenants. “Although she was the first one to receive an eviction notice, we had over 30 units that also received rent increases of this amount.”

Berk has lived in the building for more than a decade. The landlord, a non-profit affiliated with the Windsor Jewish Federation, regularly provided her subsidies that kept her rent around $450 per month, according to the Board’s ruling this month.

But last year, Berk was informed her new rent would be $700 per month — a jump of more than 50 per cent. It’s still well below market rate, but Berk claims she doesn’t have the money to cover it. She continued paying her old rate, leading the landlord to serve her with the eviction notice.

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"It pains us to have to increase anybody's rent,” Stephen Cheifetz, head of the Windsor Jewish Federation, told CBC Windsor last year. “We'd rather not if we didn't have to, but you can't have a building without that.”

"Who pays for the increase in property taxes? Who pays for the increase in utilities? Who pays for the maintenance repairs? We've been doing it, and because of that we have significant losses," he said.

He also said they were pursuing eviction to show tenants that there were consequences to not paying the new rental rates, but would not actually enforce the evictions unless the tenants were disruptive or had caused damage to the property.

Cheifetz, reached by phone last week, said he had “no comment” on the Board’s recent decision and hung up.

The landlord, the I.L. Peretz Senior Citizen Corporation, argued before the Board that the building was a designated housing project — and that as a result, it qualified for an exemption from the typical rules, which last year limited rental increases to 2.5 per cent.

On Aug. 10, the Board agreed that the complex is a designated housing project. But to qualify for the exemption, the landlord would have also had to prove that it was “owned, operated or managed by a service manager or local housing corporation.”

The Board member handling the case wrote that there was “no evidence before” her that that was the case. As a result, the 2.5 per cent limit applied for last year, and Berk’s 56 per cent higher rent as listed in the eviction notice “appears to be illegal,” the Board’s order reads.

“The Landlord cannot seek termination of the tenancy based on a defective Notice of Termination,” the order states.

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The decision gave the landlord until Aug. 24 to “seek an order for arrears only,” meaning the 2.5 per cent of the 56 per cent increase. It also said that if the landlord did not seek such an order, the case would be dismissed.

Jwad said the landlord had not done so. It’s unclear if the landlord will take any other additional steps in the case.

But Jwad says other tenants are now challenging their rent increases before the Board, with a hearing planned for October.

She says she understands that the landlord is facing higher operating costs and that the rental rates are low, but that those were the amounts originally set by the landlord.

“You brought them here at this rate, they've been paying you this rate,” she said. “To abruptly change that and claim an exemption — ultimately the board did not agree.”

Sylvia says she’s tried to keep busy during the legal process to keep her mind off it, but is feeling optimistic about the future.

“All the tenants in the building have been worried and distressed, some of them,” she said. “I would say have faith, hang in there because I think it's going well. I think we'll be in a good situation from now on where we can afford the rent.”

Emma Loop is a video journalist at CBC Windsor. She previously spent eight years covering politics, national security, and business in Washington, D.C. Before that, she covered Canadian politics in Ottawa. She has worked at the Windsor Star, Ottawa Citizen, Axios, and BuzzFeed News, where she was a member of the FinCEN Files team that was named a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. She was born and raised in Essex County, Ont. You can reach her at emma.loop@cbc.ca.