Parkdale tenants are on a winning streak.

In one of Toronto’s rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods, the consecutive successes of two major protests against landlords in the past year demonstrates the power tenants have when mobilizing around their demands, housing advocates say, but it also underscores the need for more regulation from the provincial government.

The latest victory came this week after tenants at a King St. W. highrise stopped paying rent for two months in response to a bid from their landlord, property management firm Nuspor Investments, to raise rents by more than double the amount recommended by the government. Nuspor Investments has since abandoned the bid, and tenants are slated to meet on Wednesday to discuss next steps.

“It’s a rare demonstration of the economic power that residential tenants have. We don’t see it very often, but the reality is every month, residential tenants hand over more than a billion dollars to their landlords. That’s a lot of economic clout,” said Kenneth Hale, legal director for the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario.

In August 2017, tenants also won several significant concessions from one of the city’s largest landlords, MetCap Living Management Inc. Hundreds of tenants went on a rent strike for just over three months beginning in May, claiming that units in 12 Parkdale buildings were in urgent need of repairs. They also protested what they called repeated and unfair rent hikes intended to force out low-income tenants.

“We look at tenants often as victims or as people without any power,” said Hale. “There is a lot of power there, but it’s difficult for people to organize, and it takes a lot of smarts and stamina to be able to work together to do something like this.”

Last year, the government of Ontario extended rent control — which previously had applied only to units that came into use prior to November 1991 — to all residential properties in the province, setting an annual cap, or “guideline” for rent increases tied to the Consumer Price Index. The cap for 2018 is 1.8 per cent.

But a longstanding policy in the Residential Tenancies Act allows property owners and managers to apply to the Landlord and Tenant Board for the right to raise rent beyond the guideline in order to recoup costs of certain capital expenditures or “extraordinary” increases in tax.

The Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario has been campaigning to have the government tighten regulations to double down on unfair above-guideline rent increases. An absence of enforcement from the government has resulted in tenants going “outside of that system” by means of protest to negotiate with their landlords, Hale said.

Rent strikes could be popping up more in Toronto, said Kerry Riordan, who helped to organize the protest at the King St. W. building she’s called home for the last seven years.

“I do think this is something that you’ll see more of…This kind of thing does keep happening, not just in Parkdale but all over the city,” Riordan said. “If you organize and you stick to your message, and really support your neighbours…you can win these things.”

Councillor Gord Perks (Ward 14 Parkdale-High Park), says rent strikes are a temporary solution.

“It’s good that this particular group of tenants and the previous group of tenants who participated in a rent strike have been able to win some concessions,” he said, “But I believe we need a larger structural solution because I can tell you for every one person who’s succeeded in avoiding an above-guideline rent increase, I’m hearing from 10 who haven’t.”

Perks sits on the Affordable Housing Committee, and said that conflicts in this area are “multiplying fantastically” in Toronto. It’s the issue he spends the most time on among his constituency, and he predicts that these conflicts will only increase until the government “closes the loopholes” that allow landlords to off-load maintenance costs onto tenants.

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“We have to decide whether we’re a city that everyone can live in, or whether we’re a city where only the wealthy can live in. The holes in the Rental Tenancy Act and the lack of real funding that can allow us to build deeply affordable rental housing is creating an unprecedented crisis.”

With files from Emily Mathieu and the Canadian Press