City hall bylaw officials blitz six-building apartment cluster, eyeing landlord issues

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Six buildings. Seven-hundred apartments. One strategy to ensure London’s rental units are ship-shape.  

City hall bylaw officials blitzed a 700-unit apartment complex at 740-758 Kipps Lane in the city’s northeast end Saturday, taking a page out of a similar program in Toronto to ensure landlords are complying with property standards.  

“We went to Toronto and shadowed their inspectors and borrowed best practices,” said Orest Katolyk, the city’s bylaw enforcement boss. “This is focused, proactive enforcement as opposed to inspecting every building in the city.” 

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Bylaw officials handed out notices to all residents in the complex weeks in advance of the blitz, encouraging tenants with property-related concerns to raise them by filling out the form or speaking with a bylaw officer day-of, Katolyk said. 

Five officers and a supervisor spent much of Saturday following up and inspecting the units of tenants who made complaints and checking the common areas of the buildings, including stairwells, hallways and laundry facilities.  

“This one was picked because we were looking at the area, and with six buildings in a row, we thought we could hit them all at once,” said bylaw supervisor Patrick Cowan.  

The officers were on the lookout for a variety of building-related issues that are the landlord’s responsibility to repair, including problems with elevators that are not working, fixtures, plumbing, or ventilation, Cowan said. The inspections may result in orders by London bylaw officials.  

The bylaw department does at least 10 of these proactive blitzes each year across the city, Katolyk said, in both apartment building and low-density neighbourhoods. 

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“We have metrics on complaints. We create a map of those metrics and decide which buildings and areas we want to inspect,” Katolyk said. “We’ve been all across the city, from Byron to east London to downtown and near the university.”  

The blitzes are a way for the city to assess the quality of its rental stock and ensure landlords are providing safe, up-to-code living conditions for their tenants, said Ward 3 Coun. Peter Cuddy.  

“We want to see constant upgrades and constant improvements by landlords in our city. We have that for the most part, but there are a few bad actors that we need to call out,” he said. “I want my constituents in Ward 3 to know that we are on top of this.”  

Sireg Management Inc. bought the complex, at near the intersection of Kipps Lane and Adelaide Street North, in 2021 and recognized that the buildings would require significant upgrades, both functional and aesthetic, said Richard Haynes, vice-president of site management.

The company has spent more than $100,000 in the last two years on pest control alone and is planning additional upgrades to the exterior of the buildings, Haynes said. 

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While Sireg wants tenants to come forward with their property-related issues, including posting QR codes to the work order portal in common areas, the blitz is another way tenants can bring concerns forward, Haynes said.  

“We want tenants to feel comfortable communicating with us,” he said. “We’re trying to be proactive, encouraging them to come to us. If repairs need to happen and we’re not aware of it and they’re not done in a timely matter, it’s more expensive and difficult to fix it later.”

Haynes said the blitz has been a transparent process with good dialogue with bylaw officials so far.  

The blitz comes days before another measure intended to protect the city’s renters is debated by city politicians. London’s proposed renoviction bylaw is heading to council’s community and protective services committee Monday, potentially a last step before it is presented to full council for approval. 

“I hope we get a decision so we can put some additional protections in place,” Deputy Mayor Shawn Lewis said.    

The proposed bylaw is intended to reduce or prevent renovictions by bad faith landlords – the practice of forcing renters out of their units for major repairs, which is legal in Ontario, then making it unfeasible for the tenants to return due to long delays. The vacant units are then put on the market with drastically increased rents. 

The proposed bylaw would, among other measures, require landlords seeking this type of eviction to apply to city hall for a licence, creating additional oversight for the process.

Similar city hall enforcement blitzes to the one on Saturday will be part of the plan when the renoviction bylaw is passed by council, Cuddy said.  

jbieman@postmedia.com

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