A Vancouver Island woman says she was forced out of her home and left with no recourse, but now she is questioning what happened.
Chelsea Langlois told Global News she had to move her family of four out of their rental home in Langford, B.C., when she was notified it would be torn down for development.
“While we were struggling, looking for a place to live, we thought we would reach out to the developer and just ask them since the rezoning hasn’t (yet) gone through, could we stay just until those permits go through?” she said
“At that time he said, ‘No, we have a permit to demolish. That’s all we need to evict you. And our plan is to demolish and start prepping the land in preparation for the rezoning permit’.”
Langlois said it got to the point where they thought they would have to leave the area, live in a van or even separate the family.
She eventually managed to find another place to live, albeit at more than $1,000 more per month. And that wasn’t easy.
“My experience with that is that there are hundreds if not thousands of applicants per rental,” Langlois said.
“It really is about presenting yourself in a way that the landlord would see you as a benefit to tenant their place. So very much an interview-type process. I’m very lucky that I’m a registered nurse and a college instructor, so that bodes well when I interview to rent a place. However, not everybody has that kind of criteria to back them up, which is frustrating.
“But we went to the lengths of having the prospective landlords come to our current rental to see how we take care of our home in order to demonstrate that we would.”
Then, in another blow, about six months later, their former neighbours told them there was someone else living in their former rental home.
“So we went up and had a look for ourselves and it did appear to be occupied,” Langlois said. “So not only had it not been demolished, but it’s still standing and it has new tenants living in it.”
She said the whole experience has been extremely frustrating.
“The stress we went through trying to find a new place, the increased expenses of having to move, and knowing that that home is still standing and we could still be living there could have saved us not only money but a lot of stress and angst as well,” she added.
In a statement, the developer blames the City of Langford, saying it was given a demolition permit but the city then changed it to require that the house be moved instead.
The developer said it had to re-rent the house while dealing with the new requirements because it was losing money with the house empty.
The City of Langford told Global News it cannot comment on the file.
“I did initially believe it was on the developer, but through arbitration found out that the permit was solely issued to evict us,” Langlois said.
“And I was just shocked by that, that the city would issue a permit for the sole purpose of evicting tenants in a global pandemic during a housing crisis.”
She added she would like to see the City of Langford take accountability for its actions in issuing permits to demolish with no intent to demolish the property for the sole purpose of evicting tenants.
“I would like to see the city really look at how they’re going to promote housing for individuals and how they’re going to tackle our housing crisis rather than contributing to it,” she said.
© 2023 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
