From the sidewalk, very little about the lowrise brick building at 795 College St. appears to have changed.Inside, however, the spacious and once extremely affordable apartments have undergone extensive renovations to become luxury rentals, with the three-bedroom units advertised online for at least $4,000 a month. The building is also missing the original renters, who tried and failed to stop their evictions at the Landlord and Tenant Board. What happened at 795 College St. is a story of tenants in a rapidly gentrifying city, who were forced out of their homes because rental housing law allows landlords to remove tenants during renovations but doesn’t have the power to ensure they get back in, based on a recent ruling. The term “renovictions” is used to describe when a landlord pushes people out for renovations and counts on them not coming back so they can dramatically raise the rent and find new tenants. But it is a tenant’s legal right to come back once work is done and without a substantial increase in rent. Five former renters at 795 College St. said that is what happened to them after their building was bought for just over $1.5 million in 2014. Two years later they were ordered out. The tenants claim they clearly stated their intention to move back in, but the property owner gutted their apartments and found new people willing to pay three times the rent, ignoring their rights.But here’s the hitch. The new occupants of 795 College St. are entitled to protection under the Residential Tenancies Act and can’t be ordered out, a board adjudicator determined in March. “I thought the whole point of the Landlord and Tenant Board was to protect people in these situations and I am aghast at how flimsy that was, how empty that promise was,” said Aurora Browne, 45, who lived with partner Kris Siddiqi, 37, in the building for close to 10 years. “It seems as if the Landlord and Tenant Board has absolutely no spine ...
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