On the Brink: How a tight rental market makes it easier for landlords to discriminate

Earlier this month, we brought you a series called ‘On the Brink,’ which profiles people who are struggling with the rising cost of living and housing in Nova Scotia. In this story, we speak with an expert about rental discrimination and the challenges tenants are facing while trying to access housing.

As Nova Scotia’s housing crisis persists, it’s getting more and more difficult to find a place to live.

With people being increasingly priced out of homeownership, putting further pressure on the rental market, tenants are especially feeling the pinch amid skyrocketing rental prices and rock-bottom vacancy rates.

Mark Culligan, a community legal worker with the Dalhousie Legal Aid Service, said the cards are stacked against tenants due to their lack of consumer power under current market conditions.

“The biggest challenge right now is that there’s not many available units, and because there’s not many available units, landlords can ask a lot of money for them,” he said.

Culligan added that many landlords are also offering only fixed-term leases, “which really make a tenant a lot more vulnerable during the tenancy.”

“It puts all the power in terms of the renewal of the lease in the hands of the landlord,” he said.

Over the course of the On the Brink series, we spoke with a number of tenants who had difficulty finding housing.

Multiple people said they felt as though they weren’t an “ideal candidate” for a number of reasons: because they had kids, collected government assistance, or due to their age, disability, gender identity or colour of their skin.

It’s a violation of the Human Rights Act to deny tenancy to someone due to their disability, age, race, religion, sexual orientation, family status, marital status, source of income, or any other protected characteristic listed under the act.

But Culligan said it’s happening anyway.

“The tighter the rental market, the easier it is for landlords to discriminate,” he said. “They don’t have to respond to applications, and they can pick and choose who they want.

“That would be the same in any kind of market, and it brings out the worst in people when you have an imbalance of power.”

He said the Dal Legal Aid team hears “a lot” about discrimination on the basis of family status, especially from families with young children.

“Many landlords don’t want to rent to people in that situation because they think the kids are more likely to damage the apartment or produce noise and disturb other tenants,” he said.

He said they also hear about discrimination against people from outside Canada, especially international students.

“Lots of international students are being asked to pay amounts of money that are unlawful, such as rents in advance, or higher-than-allowable security deposits,” he said.

There are “limited” legal avenues that prospective tenants can pursue if they feel they are being denied tenancy based on a protected characteristic, but Culligan said those cases are notoriously difficult to prove.

“You need a witness, you need something in writing, and typically we don’t see people explicitly discriminating on the basis of, say, race or gender, but they’ll use kind of a proxy,” he explained.

“So, either they’ll not respond to an application, or they’ll say, ‘Oh, you don’t make enough.’”

He noted that the director of residential tenancies only has jurisdiction over tenancies that are already established, so they wouldn’t be able to help during the application process.

“It is possible to make a human rights complaint, but that can take several years and it is rarely worthwhile in light of the kind of damages that one could receive for a human rights complaint,” he said.

In order to curb rental discrimination, Culligan said there should be more regulation of the rental market, more penalties for landlords breaking the rules, and more public and social options for people who are excluded from the private market.

“The public housing process has a fairly neutral application process, and is much more willing to take people irrespective of any assumption of risk,” he said.

Onus of proof

In an interview, Joe Fraser, the executive and CEO of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, agreed that it can “be a challenge” for a complaint to succeed.

“The onus of the proof really does rest with the individual who’s bringing the complaint forward, and that can be a difficult thing for an individual to prove,” he said.

The majority of the Human Rights Commission’s work involves employment cases, with accommodation and housing only making up a small number of complaints.

He said the Human Rights Commission receives about 2,000 inquiries in total per year, only about 100 of which move on to an investigation.

And even if it reaches the investigation stage, it’s a lengthy process: the intake — from someone’s initial contact to a signed complaint — takes about four to five months. Then it takes about eight months for the file to be assigned to a human rights officer, and a further 12 to 18 months for an investigation.

Fraser said the commission has heard inquiries from people who believed they were denied rental accommodation based on race or their source of income – so if someone is on income assistance, or other social supports.

He said they have also had inquiries about discriminatory comments.

“We’ve had a number of examples where the individual will be in telephone or email correspondence with the landlord about a potential rental,” he said.

“And then when they actually go to see the location and the landlord in person, the landlord gleans more information about the person’s race, or disability, gender identity, that sort of thing, and then the unit becomes unavailable.”

With the amount of time and effort involved, Fraser says it’s an “individual decision” of whether or not to proceed with a human rights complaint.

He encourages prospective tenants who feel like they’ve been discriminated against to reach out to the Human Rights Commission, because they can also provide resources to point tenants in the right direction.

“It’s more than worthwhile to reach out and make an inquiry, and we can help the individual understand what the process would be,” he said.

Fraser said it’s important for both landlords and tenants to become educated on what is and isn’t allowed, and what their rights are.