By Emily Miller
Tenants facing mass eviction from a heritage building in downtown Ottawa marched to their landlord’s office on Sept. 10. Residents are demanding that Smart Living Properties (SLP) drop the N13 eviction notices and meet with tenants.
Thirty tenants and supporters organizing under the banner of Bank Block Tenants (BBT) first met outside their building at 8am on Tuesday morning.
“We’ve had the chance to talk to hundreds upon hundreds of people in this community and what we’ve heard overwhelmingly is that people are opposed to this eviction project and people support the Bank Block Tenants,” said Ethan Mitchell of the Peoples’ Assembly on Housing, one of the community groups supporting BBT.
The group marched to SLP’s office at 226 Argyle Avenue where tenants delivered a letter and demanded a meeting with owners Tamer Abaza and Rakan Abushaar. Nobody came out of the building. However, Jules Lauzon, Smart Living’s Vice President, Development, Construction & Design, was seen entering the office. When told by one supporter that tenants want to meet with Abaza and Abushaar, Lauzon said, “That’s not going to happen.” Lauzon has been leading the development application to the City.
I don’t understand why Smart Living has refused to meet with us as a group. They are planning to destroy our homes and the least they could do is talk to us.
In front of the SLP office, Julie Ivanoff, a tenant and member of BBT, read the demand letter aloud.
“This letter serves as notice that we, the tenants of 227 Bank Street and 178 Nepean Street, have come together to collectively refuse to move,” she said. “We must highlight the harm you have already inflicted upon us since your delivery of the N13s. There’s a life-threatening crisis in store for us if you succeed in taking away our homes. You will leave many of us with nowhere to go but the streets.”
Ivanoff continued, “We demand that you immediately withdraw the N13 notices, cease with threats of eviction and sit down for a meeting with us.”
SLP purchased the buildings in August 2022 and issued N13 eviction notices to tenants in October 2023. An N13 is a landlord notice to end a tenancy for the purposes of demolishing, repairing, or converting a unit. Since first issuing the N13 eviction notices, SLP representatives have refused to meet with tenants.
“I don’t understand why Smart Living has refused to meet with us as a group”, said Ben Emond, a tenant living at 227 Bank Street. “They are planning to destroy our homes and the least they could do is talk to us.”
It is not the first time that Abaza and Abushaar have failed to respond to tenant’s demands. Back in March of this year, tenants collectively wrote a letter, calling on SLP “to withdraw the N13s, cease threats of evictions, and communicate with the tenants as a group rather than individually.” Instead of dialogue, tenants received a series of new eviction notices.
According to Ivanoff, some tenants have been living there for over 40 years, in some of the last affordable rental housing in downtown Ottawa. All of the tenants on the block are working class, living on low incomes, including fixed incomes such as Old Age Security and ODSP.
“How much money would they lose if they incorporated affordable housing into the new building they plan to build?” asked Emond.
At a time when there is a chronic shortage of affordable housing, the targeting of low-income tenants is calculated, according to Ivanoff, as it allows landlords to evict tenants paying lower rents and replace them with new tenants paying higher rents.
According to development proposal designs submitted to the City of Ottawa, SLP has plans to build smaller units on the property, with an average size of 316 square feet. Eighty-seven percent of their proposed units are studios, averaging 267 square feet in size.
SLP’s Chief Operating Officer, Rakan Abushaar wrote in a letter to the Ottawa Citizen that the proposed redevelopment goal “is to turn the area into a true community space.” Abushaar was responding to a Citizen article suggesting that low-income residents would be forced to move.
SLP is committed to ensuring a smooth and supportive relocation process for affected tenants, stated Abushaar. However, relocation is merely a misnomer for the “mass eviction of long-standing members of the community” asserted BBT in a public reply to Abushaar’s letter published on Our Turn.
SLP’s proposed building plans are currently in the Planning Committee process under the City of Ottawa, which have not been approved. SLP has no plans to re-house the current tenants into their proposed new building at current rental rates, which are below the average market rent.
This is also not the first “renoviction” or “demoviction” for Smart Living Properties, according to a press release issued by BBT. The group has documented several properties that have previously been targeted by SLP, and want their neighbours to know that this problem goes beyond their particular building. Many tenants in Ottawa are at risk of similar situations.
Despite this, few mechanisms exist outside tenant organizing to stop mass evictions such as what is proposed by SLP.
SLP has not responded to The Leveller‘s request for comments by the time of publishing.
“We’ve seen city council not take much action on this yet. We’re calling on city councilors to do the right thing and represent their constituents instead of the big landlords and the developers,” said Mitchell. “We’ve seen this happen time and time again, and we’re not going to stand anymore for landlords destroying affordable housing, for making us and our neighbours homeless, for destroying our communities. We’re not going to accept it anymore.”
