“I really don’t care about money right now, I care about YOU … You shouldn’t be struggling to find a roof for your family.”

That’s the shocking email 38-year-old Sarah Vanderhelm received from Chris Boyes, the landlord of her downtown Toronto condo. This comes after a “devastating time” when Vanderhelm had been laid off from her dream job as a cook, with no income during the COVID-19 pandemic.

While others are scrambling to pay rent, landlords as of Wednesday are still allowed to threaten tenants with eviction, though Premier Doug Ford promised no tenants would lose their homes during the outbreak. That’s why this message “touched” Vanderhelm so deeply, especially coming from someone who she’d only met once.

“It made me tear up, it really did. A person we don’t really consider ‘family’ is treating his tenants like family,” she says.

On top of that, Boyes also offered all tenants who were struggling to afford basics to contact him if they needed supplies like medicine or groceries that he could deliver.

“My tenants are people, and I think we should treat them as such,” Chris Boyes wrote to the Star in the email. This past week, he’s been busy scrambling to organize his own books as he freezes rent for his 36 tenants.

“How can I possibly ask someone to pay rent when they’ve lost their job and it wasn’t their fault? This is downtown Toronto. Rent is anything but cheap here.”

Having lived paycheque-to-paycheque in the city, Boyes also says he’s paying a good deed forward, just as his former landlord did when he had faced tough times. “When I ended up losing my job, (my landlord) completely waived my rent payment for the couple months I had no income for. I am now in a fortunate position to do so.”

On top of the delivery runs and the temporary rent freeze, Boyes is urging his tenants who have not lost their jobs to store their money away for a rainy day instead of paying rent. “Even if you are capable of paying rent, hold onto the money for your own good. We do not know what’s to come,” he wrote in the letter.

The email Boyes sent to his tenants — which was screenshotted by Vanderhelm and sent to her brother Dale who later posted on Twitter — has received praise, with more than 1,000 retweets since it was posted Tuesday. Unfortunately, some responses from other Twitter users show a completely different story through email screenshots of landlords demanding rent payments from their tenants.

“I have a few messages, to not only landlords but to the government. Tenants are often left out to dry. Let’s support them,” he says. “Start treating tenants as people.”

Boyes’s generosity is something Vanderhelm hopes catches on with other landlords. “It’s disappointing that what Chris did is a rare occurrence. It should be the other way around. I’m so fortunate to have such an amazing landlord.”