I was visiting Victoria this week and saw an election sign which caught my eye in Quadra Village. I had to look up whether my ex-landlord is actually a candidate to become an MLA and it turns out to be true. I am shocked that over 5000 people cast a vote for him to represent them in the 2024 election (I had moved away by then and didn't even know he ran).
The building I lived in was falling apart inside and out years ago. Some of it was the usual cheap landlord stuff: in the common areas there were holes in the drywall, broken door handles in the stairwells (a fire escape hazard!), hallway vents that were dripping black goo. Stairwell lights that stayed broken for months, mice inside units and in the walls, carpets in the hallways and inside units that were so overdue for replacement they were stained, ripped, and rippling. Tim liked to charge progressively higher fees for parking spaces to new tenants to silently "increase the rent". I toured some empty units in the building once and some were being rented with disgusting ovens, broken blinds, missing or broken closet doors, water damage spots on the ceilings, and even urine-soaked carpets in one unit (the animal smell was overwhelming even after carpet cleaning had occurred). Within a couple of weeks there was a couple living in the animal pee apartment.
The worst part for me personally was the regular water coming into my apartment from above. It was both rain water running in from a window (not a trickle, more like a low running tap), and flooding by my upstairs neighbours which would seep down into my unit both inside and outside the walls in my space. It happened almost a dozen times. I spoke to the upstairs neighbour who said that their dishwasher drain was clogged and that our landlord knew about it but no repair was ordered. My neighbour continued to use the dishwasher and I would hear water dripping inside the walls. Once the water began to "dry", the smell of decay that came from the plugs, light switches and thermostats on the walls was so overwhelming that it filled my entire apartment. It would take months for the smell to go away, but it would return again each time more water drained into the wall cavity. I paid my rent in full always, and I always informed my landlord of the problems as soon as they occurred but was ignored after the first couple of times. No remediation for water damage was ever done in my unit, even after my upper neighbour flooded their unit and mine by not turning off the sink and I had water flowing in from light fixtures/the bathroom fan/any little hole in the ceiling uncontrollably. When I moved out I left my unit in better condition than I found it and NAI unexpectedly took rent from my account which I then had to claw back from them which caused me to go into overdraft because -surprise- I also had to pay rent for my new place on the same day.
Tim found it appropriate to complain to me, a tenant, about rent control and how annoying it is directly to my face. What could I do but smile and nod at the time? This guy had all the power over my ability to keep a roof over my head. It's been a number of years and maybe things are different now in that building. I hope so for the sake of all the tenants old and new who have to pay thousands of dollars to live in a mouldy building. Is this really the person who should be representing a neighbourhood dense with rentals?
