Vancouver tenants allege eviction for landlord's Olympics profiteering

Pen poised to sign a rental agreement for one bedroom in a well-kept Vancouver home last July, grad student Sue Brown asked for one assurance before making the deal.

The lease was set to end Jan. 31, 2010, just before the start of the Olympic Games and smack dab in the middle of her school semester.

Knowing affordable housing would be scarce in February when the city will be flooded with visitors, she asked if she could extend the lease.

Told it wouldn't be a problem, the 28-year-old made out cheques for $580 per month and moved in.

Now Brown and her housemates say they're the victims of an Olympic eviction, after they were handed eviction notices only to find online postings advertising the property as a "Winter Olympics House" that sleeps up to 20 people.

Cost: $11,900 a week or $34,000 for February and March.

"It's a really, really, really horrible, vulnerable, awful feeling to lose your home and have no control over what's happening when it happens," Brown told reporters Monday, while standing outside the house on a tree-lined street just a short jog from Olympic venues.

"I'm really unnerved and disturbed at how easy it was and how it can happen to anyone, so that's why I wanted to bring this forward."

Calls to the landlord were not returned.

Brown and her housemates are the first group to go public with specific allegations of Olympic-related evictions that Games opponents have long warned about

"My sense is this is the tip of the iceberg, it's the beginning of December and this is when I imagine these situations will start to ramp up," said Laura Track, a spokeswoman for Pivot Legal Society, who joined members of the Olympic Resistance Network to publicize the situation Monday.

In April, the City of Vancouver passed a housing bylaw allowing temporary rentals during the Games, so long as landlords have a municipal licence.

The bylaw stipulated that if they've taken on tenants after June 1, they cannot rent the premises during that same period - whether or not a lease ends or the tenants move out.

"Our bylaw doesn't prevent evictions, unfortunately.... But what we've tried to do is we've tried to put measures in the bylaw to discourage landlords from evicting tenants," said Celine Mauboules, a city housing policy planner.

She said the city is currently investigating Brown's allegations, which - if proven to be true and the house is rented - would break the bylaw.

To seek recourse, however, she said the tenants will have to take their complaints to their provincially-run Residential Tenancy Branch.

A group tasked by the city with helping tenants with Olympic-related housing issues has heard a few "horror stories" of evictions in Whistler and Squamish, but hasn't had as many Vancouver complaints as they'd expected.

Martha Lewis, executive director of the Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre, said they've mostly received calls from residents who at this point are only concerned they'll be forced to leave.

Brown got verbal assurances without putting them in writing, part of what makes her situation tricky. But she says the bylaw and the reason given for the group to leave just don't add up.

The eviction notice states the rental unit will be occupied by the landlord's family - seemingly contradicted by the ad describing a "character house very close to major Olympic and Paralympic Venues awaiting you for February and March 2010!"

The tenants haven't filed a formal complaint, Brown said, though they did sign on to the city's online tenant registry. It was created along with the bylaw to protect renters from being displaced.

The upshot for Brown is that she's had to rearrange her schooling schedule and will move back to her Waterloo-area home in Ontario come the Games, while a fellow tenant and restaurant worker, Sam Campbell, 24, will be out a bed.

"It means I'm going to be here but basically living couch to couch while I'm working everyday," he said.

Winnipeg Free Press