Dear Editor:
Re: “Votes speak volumes,” July 16, News.
Right on! Your editorial is a great reminder to all.
We must learn to ignore the proliferation of good press politicians- — elicit, contrived or not — and focus on how they vote.
Hot air may raise the balloon, but if the burner runs out of fuel at voting time, it falls to earth with a heavy bump.
Two of many problems facing municipalities in the Lower Mainland, including Richmond, are a lack of affordable rental housing, and a preponderance of vacant properties.
Both problems may be ameliorated if only the Residential Tenancy Act of B.C. were re-vamped to reflect some degree of justice and equality.
Such has been governments’ efforts to protect tenants that there is no balance.
Yes, tenants need protecting, but so do landowners. The current act is inequitable, unjust and unbalanced. Case in point: A landowner files a claim with the RTO (Residential Tenancy Office) to claim approximately $600 of unpaid utility bills from a tenant.
The landowner supplies 75 plus pages of evidence. The tenant makes no defence and supplies no evidence of payment. The decision is ruled in the tenant’s favour, purely because, under the act, the claimant didn’t prove the tenant didn’t pay. D’huh!!
How can anyone prove a negative?
Try proving I didn’t send you a chocolate cake along with this letter.
In our courts, small claims or other, the defendant must prove they have paid. With the RTO, it is the other way around. Go figure!
Landowners must give twice as much notice to tenants to move out as a tenant must give a land owner, and then the tenant can turn around and give 10 days notice. Plus, the landlord must give back one month’s rent to the tenant. What other service provider or supplier is ruled by such an onerous law?
None.
Is it any wonder investors buy property and prefer to leave it vacant? It just isn’t worth the hassle. Is it any wonder landowners refuse to be landlords/ladies?
If our city politicians are really serious about alleviating the affordable housing situation, they will get together with other municipalities in the Lower Mainland and lobby the provincial government to scrap or amend the existing Residential Tenancy Act and make life easier and fairer for everyone concerned.
With a fair, equitable and balanced act, this would protect all parties concerned, equally. More property owners would rent their properties; more people would invest in rental properties as opposed to the volatile and insecure stock market; the residential rental vacancy rate would rise, and rents would be more reasonable.
Bingo!
The number of vacant properties would decrease; the number of affordable rental properties would increase; rents would decrease, or at least not rise at such a rate, and city staff would be able to take the heat off the developers. But then, heaven forbid, they’d lose all that cash with which they use to pay themselves.
Well, there has to be one downside to every great plan.
Two problems have disappeared, or at least been decreased significantly.
Let’s see where, in our city chambers, does the intestinal fortitude lie.
Yvonne Harwood
Richmond
