WATERLOO - If landlords fail to respond to maintenance requests or complaints, tenants can ask the city of Waterloo to inspect their units and ensure necessary work gets done.

The director of municipal enforcement services, Shayne Turner, clarified the city's role at Monday's council meeting, and outlined what staff can do to make sure students and other tenants live in clean and safe housing.

Councillors requested the information following the leak of thousands of maintenance requests from a local rental housing company almost two weeks ago that points to allegedly poor housing conditions in an area of the city predominantly rented by students.

Turner said if tenants have a problem with their units, they should call their landlords first to file a work order, but "if they don't get that addressed in a reasonable time, they can contact us and we'll do an inspection," he said.

If the problem falls under the city's property standards bylaw (such as mould, ill-fitting doors and windows, heating problems or certain appliances not working) the city will issue its own work order to the property owner.

If the work still isn't completed within the specified time frame, the city can take the landlord to court or do the work itself and add the costs to the building's property taxes, Turner said.

The city's response is limited to maintenance concerns, however. Disputes over such things as high key deposits or rent payment fall under provincial jurisdiction.

Turner also stressed the city must be invited into the unit by the tenant to do the inspection - "we can't go knocking door to door and go into these units without permission," he said.

Tenants have the option of taking their complaints to the provincial Landlord and Tenant Board, as well, but those can take weeks or months to resolve.

The issue of student housing conditions arose this month after one or more people claiming to be student tenants at a building operated byAccommod8u exploited a security flaw within the company's online maintenance request portal and scraped more than 18 months of requests from the website.

That information was released to raise awareness about allegedly poor housing conditions inside buildings on Albert Street, Columbia Street, Lester Street and Sunview Street.

More than 6,100 requests were posted to the web, ranging from mould, heating problems, vermin and malfunctioning smoke or carbon monoxide detectors, to plumbing, general maintenance and other repair requests.

City councillors noticed the breach and asked staff to address it during Monday's council meeting.

"Without condoning the way some of us found out about these (numbers), it's important to understand what they mean for those tenants . what the city's role is, and what we can do in the future," said Ward 6 Coun. Jeff Henry, whose ward is home to both universities and a large population of student renters.

"Everyone deserves a safe place to live in our city," Henry added.

Waterloo NDP MPP Catherine Fife said her office is inundated each fall with post-secondary students who have problems with their rental units and don't know where to turn for help.

She said the province should do a better job of informing tenants of their rights, and that the measures currently in place to protect tenants take too long to process and don't carry stiff enough penalties.

Fife plans to host a meeting in November to help educate tenants.

"The vast majority of students don't understand they have rights," she said.

The University of Waterloo's undergraduate student association voted Sunday to create a subcommittee to investigate the "student housing crisis" and look into a class-action lawsuit against negligent landlords and property companies offering substandard housing.

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A group calling itself the Kitchener-Waterloo Revolutionary Student Movement has also planned a protest at city hall on Sept. 23 at 5 p.m. to force the city to pay closer attention to housing conditions.

Accommod8u is owned by local development company Prica Global Enterprises. The data that was released is linked to eight buildings near the two universities owned or previously owned by the company.

Prica has an estimated 2,400 student rental bedrooms in Waterloo and controls about 14.3 per cent of the rental housing market in the city.

A spokesperson for the company has said that drawing "conclusions about a management company's performance, quality or care without contextual information or response data, is insufficient, if not irresponsible."

The company said it has fixed the security flaw, that no personal data was leaked, and that it will not respond to any further requests for comment on the issue.

Police are investigating the data breach, and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing declined to comment for that reason.

A list of how tenants can respond to concerns about their rental housing is available on the ministry website.

Andrew Macallum, president of the Waterloo Regional Apartment Management Association, said he fears the city will use the data leak as an opportunity to create more bylaws and rules around rental housing in the city when the province already has regulations in place.

"It's easy for municipal governments to assume responsiblity for trying to manage and solve local issues which may, in fact, already have regulatory power through a higher body of government," he said.

jjackson@therecord.com

Twitter: @JamesDEJ