Mingzhe Zhang via Pexels

Sarah Dawson, a renter living in Toronto’s east end, was told that her rent was going to go up again for the second time in three years, and she wanted to know why.

“Every year, the rent goes up, but the problems in the building never seem to get fixed. I wanted to see where our money was going, and who really made the decisions,” Dawson said.

The aging apartment block where she lived was always having problems, and tenants were organizing for repairs. However, the issue with that was that nobody knew who owned the building. The property records indicated a numbered corporation. That corporation was connected to another company. The path soon got lost amid corporate registrations and legal structures.

This is an experience that many full-time tenants in Canada are all too familiar with.

A less publicized topic is on the agenda for tenant advocates as housing affordability becomes a political talking point: transparency around ownership. Renters typically have little awareness as to who really owns the apartment or building they live in, especially in the case of rental units that are owned through numbered corporations, investment funds, or through multiple layers of ownership.

Some jurisdictions have enacted efforts to foster transparency, but it is still very uneven. British Columbia has created a Land Owner Transparency Registry to uncover beneficial owners of land. In other regions, including Ontario and Quebec, ideas at the municipal and provincial level for landlord registries or databases of land ownership have emerged, with implementation success varying from public registries, such as British Columbia’s Land Owner Transparency Registry, to jurisdiction where public access to information is not always available.

Researchers say that this lack of transparency has real-world implications for housing experts. If the ownership is not clear, tenants can find it difficult to see who is at the helm and making decisions when it comes to repairs, safety issues, or rent disagreements. Knowing who owns a building is a first step in collective action for tenant organizers; it’s much harder to coordinate tenants over multiple buildings when ownership is obscured by corporate structures. It also makes it more difficult for municipalities and regulators to implement housing policies or identify trends in ownership concentration.

*

Transparency is more than an administrative matter; it’s one of accountability, according to advocates such as the Canadian Centre for Housing Rights and local tenant unions. The fact that large investors are now a major stakeholder in the rental market in Canada is now at the heart of discussions on affordability, displacement, and tenant rights.

There is a wide range of ideas on how to reform the housing market, each reflecting the complexity of the issue and the diverse political philosophies that are driving housing policy on the provincial and municipal level. How transparent should the ownership of residential property be is the simple but growing question at the centre of the debate.

The simplest answer, to housing advocates and researchers, is building public access to landlord registries. Property owners would have to reveal beneficial owners—in other words, the true individuals or controlling entities behind corporate registrations, trusts, and numbered companies—to get beyond the name on the title deed, to uncover who really benefits from housing assets, who really controls them, and who is making decisions about them.

Tenant rights advocates and housing policy researchers say these registries would be useful for various things. From the tenant’s point of view, they would give them a better understanding of the responsibility for their homes, facilitate tenant organization, and hold the landlord to account if there was a problem. Their value to journalists and researchers would be that they would provide a more precise picture of who is renting where and the concentration of ownership, which could reveal corporate consolidation or institutional investors’ growing share of the market. They would give politicians more accurate figures to use in creating housing policy, tax policy, and policy enforcement.

A related but less sweeping proposal advanced in housing policy discussion in Canada on the reform agenda is aimed at better disclosure instead of public registries. In this scenario, corporations and other entities holding residential property would need to provide more information to regulatory authorities about their property ownership. This information may not be made available in its entirety, but it would be available to housing regulators, housing enforcement agencies, and in some instances, to researchers or accredited institutions.

Tenant rights advocates and organizations working for transparency say it could make a considerable difference in oversight even if it’s partial. It may assist municipalities in recognizing trends of neglect within portfolios of buildings owned by a municipality. It may help provincial housing authorities monitor compliance with rental regulations. It may also diminish the power of the ownership structure to hide the responsibility in cases of disagreement.

But there is no consensus among stakeholders on the extent of transparency. There are concerns about privacy, data security, and administrative burden when discussing the use of publicly available registries. Others say that releasing data on beneficial ownership might lead to people being subjected to unwanted scrutiny or misuse of their personal information. Others say that the compliance measures may impose further obligations for landlords, especially small landlords or family-run rental businesses.

But there is a wider philosophical question that is posed by critics: whether home ownership is different from other private investments. In this view, real estate is a property right, and too much disclosure can be regarded as an encroachment on the right to do business.

Those who believe in transparency respond that housing is not a standard asset class. Residential property, unlike stocks or bonds or other financial instruments, directly influences people’s life experience. Local geographic factors shape a person’s access to schools, health care, jobs, public transportation, and networks. It is also relevant to physical safety, mental health, and economic stability and has immediate implications in all three areas.

Due to this, tenant rights advocates and housing researchers believe that housing has a special role in public life. It is not merely a unit that is rented out, but a unit that resides within a building, which has been designed by the decisions made by the owner, which may be a single person or a faceless organization or part of a large corporate or institutional entity. Here, transparency is not a burden for administration but a requirement for democracy.

As housing is becoming more expensive to buy all across Canada, the debate has grown more pressing. The public debate around the organization of the housing market has been stimulated by the rapid rent rise, increasing eviction rates, and increasing homelessness. Questions of ownership are not simply matters of policy in this context; they are at the heart of the nature of power, accountability, and inequality understood by communities.

Consequently, provinces are starting to consider revisiting their housing policies, and municipalities are trying new approaches to better regulate rental markets. For example, British Columbia has already implemented a Land Owner Transparency Registry to improve beneficial ownership disclosures. A number of jurisdictions, such as Toronto, have explored rental and property registration systems and are considering piloting ownership disclosure systems. Increased transparency of ownership would help full-time tenants, such as Dawson, easily determine who is responsible for maintaining the property, organize among themselves to have landlords repair units, and hold landlords accountable for not repairing their property in response to the needs of their tenants.

However, there are still many gaps to be filled in these incremental actions. Limited or fragmented knowledge of who owns a home continues to exist in many places in the country. The net effect is that the transparency will vary from place to place, depending on legal and political systems, and on the nature of the ownership.

The central issue of the debate has been made more complex by this uneven terrain: In a nation in a long-term housing crisis, should tenants be privileged to know who owns the building where they reside?

For many tenant advocates, housing researchers, and housing policy experts in Canada, it’s starting to seem like the answer is quite simple. They say transparency is not something you add to a housing system; it’s a basic part of a housing system. If it is not implemented, accountability is limited and there is no transparency on power, they say.

But, if transparency is known to be a good thing, why is transparency lacking in so many places under the discussion of policies?