Building a rental housing bylaw for Barrie has been shelved for at least a year.
Sitting in community safety committee Feb. 15, city councillors deferred a motion to have staff prepare the bylaw until the second quarter of 2024.
Coun. Clare Riepma, whose motion was delayed, said he can wait, but was unsure things would be better in a year.
“What we’ve been doing in the past is not working and therefore we need to do something different,” he said.
The Ward 1 councillor proposes Barrie’s rental housing bylaw be modelled on Waterloo’s, to extend licensing to all homes used for rental purposes, where the landlord does not live on the premises, and with a provision requiring a local property management company to manage the licensed rental.
Riepma pointed out that Barrie has a rental licensing system, but only for boarding, lodging and rooming houses (BLRs) where more than four unrelated people live.
However, a majority of councillors want to see numbers from the city’s enforcement services department in 2024 on how its plan works to be 25 per cent more proactive, having zero to low tolerance for bylaw infractions, longer patrol hours and possibly set fines.
“Until we get the data on the proactive, I think we’re just premature,” Deputy Mayor Robert Thomson said of a rental housing bylaw.
Coun. Bryn Hamilton noted controls on rental housing and absentee landlords have come before council before, and with no result.
“I’m nervous introducing this type of licensing,” she said. “I think there’s a lot of consequences when you go down that path. I think it’s premature.
“I’m not (even) conformable endorsing moving forward with the bylaw at this time,” Hamilton added. “I see this item has come up year over year over year.”
This isn’t council's first attempt at better regulating rental housing in Barrie.
In the fall of 2021, council had a plan to amend the business licensing bylaw to allow a three-year pilot project requiring absentee landlords — those who don’t live in their property — to obtain a business licence before renting out a single-family home, a semi-detached home or a townhouse unless the owner lives on the premise.
The pilot project would have happened in the Ward 1 area bounded by Duckworth Street, Steel Street, Penetanguishene Road and the city limits on the north side of Georgian Drive beginning Jan. 1, 2022.
But council defeated it, replacing it with a proposal for city-wide, proactive enforcement of yard maintenance, parking and property standards. The plan included hiring four bylaw enforcement officers.
In 2019, council received for information purposes a staff report that reviewed the licensing, regulation and governing of residential rental units, including absentee landlords.
In early 2017, about six years ago, a similar staff report was received for information purposes by council.
Riepma said a rental housing bylaw would protect Barrie’s housing stock so it remains affordable to city residents, protect the investment of families in established Barrie neighbourhoods and keep family housing affordable by encouraging housing that’s built specifically for students.
It would also reduce the pressure on city enforcement services to enforce bylaws which are difficult to enforce and move from an after-the fact enforcement approach to a proactive compliance approach, he added.
Such a bylaw would protect vulnerable tenants from exploitation, improve community property standards, reduce the number of illegal BLRs, along with improving community fire safety, Riepma said.
It would also level the rental playing field by better regulating the ‘grey market’, or those properties rented to more than four tenants but without a BLR licence.
Riepma said this can lead to issues of overcrowding and unsafe conditions, garbage control, parking problems, and property standards complaints.
The Ward 1 councillor said the intent is to encourage compliance, rather than enforcement.
But that will likely have to wait a year.
