Posted by Cold in Toronto on 2/13/2012, 22:15:25
Hi there.
Questions:
1) Our building has been without heat for 5 days (since Thursday, February 9th at around 3pm). The landlord was on vacation until last night (Sunday) and unreachable. The superintendant and someone helping the super determined that the problem (apparently) is in the piping under the building - a pipe burst, we have rads. It is my understanding that it is illegal to not have heat at 21 degrees celcius in an apartment from the 15th day of September in each year to the 1st day of June. The landlord last night said that this illegality doesn't apply here because he did not purposefully turn off the heat, but rather it was an "Act of God/force majeure" that the pipe burst and that he would start looking for the problem today (so far we still have no heat and no further news of what is going on). Do we have any legal recourse should this lack of heat continue ad nauseum? We had a situation a year ago where the same thing happened and we had no heat at all until the middle of November or so. (I should add that the tenants in the building that this is affecting (6 of us) got together in an ad hoc meeting with the landlord last night to see what we could do. We have been told that we can buy space heaters and take the cost of them out of our rent, as well as they will pay the difference in the hydro from the last bill to next, and we have negotiated a small rent reduction with the landlord for March - $200- that we have said we will revisit if this continues beyond tomorrow). But, I am still wondering if he is correct about his escaping the illegality of this and if we could or should fight for major rent reductions if it is not fixed soon. One or two small electric heaters do not heat our apartment. How long is too long for us to wait, what are our rights in this scenario, and what is reasonable to ask for? Should we call the city building inspectors?
2) Our building's property value was recently reassessed by the city. It went down by a small fraction of a percentage (0.74%), effective February 1, 2012. The official letter we received from the city informing us of this states that we do not have to ask for permission from the landlord for the reduction, that we should just go ahead and deduct that amount from our rent at the above date. Which we did. A week after we handed in our February rent the landlord turned around and hit the apartments with a 3.1% rent increase starting May 1, 2012. When the tenants were talking with him last night and expressing our frustrations with the building from the heat issues, to having no water hot water for 3 days over the xmas holidays, to the fact that the building is never cleaned, to his taking up to a year to make repairs, etc etc, he basically admitted that he wasn't going to increaseour rent but because we followed through on the reduction on our rent immediately he basically did it to spite us. Is it legal for him to raise our rent so soon after the decrease, even though he will be paying less taxes on the property and has so many terrible mechanical and maintenance issues with the building? Do we have any recourse to get him to roll back the increase, or is there any reason based on the problems that the building has that would make it illegal for him to raise the rent period?
Thanks!
CIT
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