this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
30 points (100.0% liked)

Canada

7188 readers
250 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Communities

🍁 Meta

πŸ—ΊοΈ Provinces / Territories

πŸ™οΈ Cities / Local Communities

πŸ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Football (CFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

πŸ’» Universities

πŸ’΅ Finance / Shopping

πŸ—£οΈ Politics

🍁 Social and Culture

Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:

https://lemmy.ca

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
30
Toronto newcomers paying up to 12 months' rent up front to secure housing (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
4 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

For two months, Carranza and her husband slept on a couch in a small, one-bathroom apartment in downtown Toronto that they shared with two other couples as they searched for a home.

The real estate agents Carranza was working with said the reason they were rejected was because they were newcomers with no credit scores, no reference letters and β€” at the time β€” no jobs. So the agents suggested they offer up to a year of rent up front.

Desperate, Carranza started looking for options on Kijiji. There, she found a one-bedroom-one-den apartment near Kipling Station for $2,250. The landlords were willing to meet with Carranza and her husband in person.

They ended up handing over $28,300 β€” their life savings β€” to prove their reliability to the landlords and, finally, secure a home. (CBC News has seen emails that confirm the transaction.)

all 5 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I mean... No jobs? I wouldn't want to rent to someone who had no job either. That's an insane risk. Even as a Canadian citizen who was born here I would not expect someone to rent to me if I had no job.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

When you are moving with a PR from Express Entry that's basically what happens. You get accepted for being skilled labor and after getting into the Country you can get a job, not the other way around. That's why you have to show proof you can sustain yourself for a year unemployed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

No job, no credit, no references, and a backed up landlord-tenant board, meaning that the landlord can't evict for at least a year if they don't pay the rent... no surprise that they had to put cash up front.

The bigger issue, though, is why stay in downtown Toronto? It's the second most expensive real estate market in Canada and an extremely competitive job market. There are a hundreds other less expensive places of live that would greatly value an influx of people with skills. Where I live (not Toronto), half of our IT department are newcomers from India and Africa who were smart enough to realize that there is more to Canada than Toronto.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Yet another case where under-funding the LTB is bad for both landlords and tenants, and yet, the backlog continues...