Tenants of a Guelph apartment complex are celebrating a "huge victory" after a year fraught with worry during a battle to remain in their homes.
Last summer, residents in 4, 6 and 8 Brant Ave. found themselves in a legal tangle with notorious renovictor Michael Klein, after a corporation he’s tied to purchased the complex.
Tenants were given N13s, legal notices to end the tenancy for renovation purposes. Legal experts and tenant advocates argue those forms are often used as a loophole for bad faith landlords to turn over tenants, resulting in new tenants who they can charge a significantly higher rent.
The notices said work was expected to take between six to nine months to complete and required vacancy, but tenants worried it wouldn’t take that long and they would come back to find their apartments rented out already.
But some tenants decided to fight back, and as of this week, it paid off.
According to Stephanie Clendenning, executive director of the Legal Clinic of Guelph and Wellington County, Klein withdrew the N13s before the Landlord Tenant Board hearing happened, which means there is no longer a pending application for eviction and the tenants can stay.
“It’s such a relief,” said Clendenning, who represented 17 units making up more than 45 residents. “I think that so much of the credit goes to this group. They really came together and formed this tenant association, and they provided each other so much support in the face of really, what was extraordinary pressure.”
As most tenants pay under $1,200 for their rent-controlled units, they worried they couldn’t afford current market rentals – the average one-bedroom apartment in Guelph is currently over $2000.
Clendenning noted that without an active application before the board, there is no immediate threat of eviction.
“Some were caregivers, seniors. We had families with multiple young children. So they’ve been terrified. They didn’t know where they were going to go, and not all of them had other options,” she said. “So I think it’s been a really scary year for them. But they are feeling a tremendous sense of relief. They’re not going to be homeless.”
Klein is a figure associated with numerous other renoviction cases across the province, including in Cambridge and Toronto. Earlier this year, he was dubbed “Ontario’s biggest renovictor” by the tenant advocacy group ACORN, and linked to 21 buildings across Ontario that house an estimated 1,750 tenants.
Klein, however, has denied allegations and said there is no such thing as renoviction.
But residents like Kerry Litchty, who is legally blind and whose teenage son is going through chemotherapy, disagree.
After an anxiety-inducing year with fear of the unknown looming over her, she’s relieved it’s over. Still, she was disappointed she didn’t get to state her case in a merit hearing, convinced she would have won and the eviction application would be overturned.
“The only thing I’m worried about now is if he’s going to come back in six months to a year and try again,” she said, noting building maintenance has largely gone ignored this whole time.
Fellow resident Daniel Kaufmann said the stress of the year drove many residents out, with only a quarter to a third of them left.
“We had to plan a lot of life not knowing if two months from now we might be out of our home,” he said.
Still, he said the support they received along the way – from the legal clinic, the County of Wellington housing services, the Brant Avenue Neighbourhood Group and other community members – was really comforting.
Kaufmann said he’s even received advice from local landlords who were concerned about the situation.
“So the support has been a really nice aspect of my life in the last year, just seeing how much the community does care about this,” he said.
But in the end, he said they “still live with a landlord who would more or less rather not have us be there. We don’t know if he’s going to (try to evict us again).”
While they can’t know for sure what caused Klein to back down, Clendenning has some ideas.
“The litigation had really just become a losing battle for Klein,” she said. “The LTB had been ruling against him on one case after another.”
Among those cases are buildings in Cambridge and Toronto, in which the Landlord Tenant Board ruled against Klein, allowing the tenants to stay.
In Cambridge, the order said the landlord hadn’t proven on a balance of probabilities the grounds for termination of the tenancy or for vacant possession of the rental unit to complete the renovations, and therefore the application was dismissed.
“There’s a series of these cases that are happening across the province. Brant Avenue is just one part of the story. The ones that had been proceeding on the merits, he was losing. So this had really become an uphill battle.”
She also believes continuous province-wide pressure from community members, advocacy groups, legal clinics and media had a “significant impact.”
“Everybody together has really put Klein’s business practices under a microscope this past year. I think that everybody’s been relentless in their advocacy, and that collaborative pressure probably started to wear them down.”
Since the Brant Avenue case didn’t get an actual merit-based hearing, she said the result won’t have quite the same impact “had it gone to the LTB and we had an adjudicator rule that this was being done in bad faith.”
“However, I don’t think it takes away the fact that this was still a huge victory. Not just for the Brant Avenue tenants, but I think it lets other people know, who might be trying to consider similar business practices, that people are going to stand up to this type of behaviour.”
Especially, she said, in this housing climate and economy “when you do absolutely everything within your power to protect whatever is left of our affordable housing supply.
“Every single unit matters, and we’re going to push back on any landlords who are engaging in bad faith eviction processes. So I hope it does get out there and other people know that this is something that’s not going to be tolerated,” she said.
That said, Clendenning is frustrated with the time and resources they had to put into something she believes shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
“I don’t feel that a legal clinic or a legal defence to an eviction application should be the answer to this type of bad faith eviction,” she said.
“It feels a little bit like a stop gap, when I think what we really need to be focusing on are the upstream approaches, getting the city to try and expedite the anti-renoviction bylaw.”
Currently, there are no legal barriers preventing him from altering renovation plans and refiling N13 notices at Brant Avenue.
She and some of the tenants plan on pushing the city to move forward quickly with the anti-renoviction bylaw and any other necessary tenant protections.
In an email, community and affordable housing manager Cushla Matthews said staff are currently focused on collecting data from community partners to “assess the local impacts of renovictions and better understand housing trends and potential policy responses.”
The options on the table they’re exploring include a renoviction bylaw, a vacant homes tax and a rental replacement bylaw.
The next step is to present a report to the Committee of the Whole in November 2025 with an update on progress, making it unlikely the bylaw will come into effect this year.
“If these bylaws were already in place, I don’t think this type of application would have ever been filed,” Clendenning said. “I hope that we’re not back here doing this again next year and year after year, and that we can move forward with the anti-renoviction bylaws.”
