LogFAQs > #936429899

When we first signed our lease, our landlord had us make a deposit of our first and last month's rent. He offered to let us count that final month's rent for this coming month instead, and we took that offer just to give us a bit more breathing room. So we technically aren't paying this month's rent, but that's through a mutual agreement with our landlord that means we're just deferring it until the end of our lease, rather than an actual rent strike or anything.

We'll see how next month goes, though hopefully by then the widespread rent strikes that are happening this week will have resulted in some sort of legislation that makes the decision for us. Our premier has actually said that anyone who can't afford rent this month should just not pay it and that the government will protect them from eviction as needed, but given that he hasn't outlined any sort of plan to make that happen and Ford hasn't exactly been super competent thus far (read: I'd be better off being governed by a paper bag duct taped to a fish tank), I'm quite happy to not be in a position where I need to test how far that statement will go.

Zeus posted...

Unless the government is waiving taxes on those landlords, people should be paying rent.

That's the thing that a lot of people don't seem to get. There are a lot of calls to waive rent the same as mortgage payments are being deferred, but equivocating them like that ignores the fundamental difference between rent and a mortgage: With a mortgage, you're gradually paying the bank the price of a product. If you stop paying for a few months, when you come back, you still owe the bank the same amount (presuming interest wasn't charged during the waived period), and the bank still owns the same percentage of your home. Nothing's changed, it's just a few months later. Rent, on the other hand, is paying for a service. Stop paying rent for a few months, and you continue to use the service, but without paying for it, and your landlord will never see the income for those months.

Now, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect landlords to lose some of their income at a time when pretty much everyone else is also losing income. That should really be a given with an economic disruption on this scale, especially where it's not like they're going to be able to readily replace a delinquent tenant with somebody else that's paying the full rent they want until this all blows over (at which point the original tenant would probably be fine to pay). But that doesn't mean people should be disregarding landlords' income the way they seem to in calling for rent freezes. The fundamental goal of any rent freeze legislation is going to have to be to protect landlords from bankruptcy, with enabling rent relief being the trickle-down effect of that (an effect which should be enforced, because there's no shortage of landlords out there who would happily take the relief cheque and then still charge rent even though they no longer need to).

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