"People are always coming and going in the common staircase. Suspicious-looking people."
"The hallway smells funny. Like medicine, not pot."
"There's a weird buzzing noise coming from upstairs."
Normally, by the type of complaints, I can figure out what's going on. Problem-tenants are usually pretty predictable. They drink or smoke their rent, hoard garbage, have wild parties, or attract pests. The more outlandish complaints are usually limited and predictable.
Comings-and-goings? Prostitution. Dealing of hard drugs.
Comings-and-goings with pot smell? Dealing pot.
Blinding light emanating from apartment with or without marijuana smell? Growing pot.
But this time, I couldn't even make an educated guess. It wasn't until another tenant from the building showed up in my office to make an official complaint.
Tenant: I'd like to make a complaint about the tattoo parlor.
Me: Excuse me?
Tenant: Yeah, the girls upstairs are running a tattoo business. You didn't know?
You better believe I didn't know! The girls in question came by to sign their lease with their mothers. They were both 17-year-old minors who needed parental authority to rent an apartment. The Moms seemed nice, responsible, and suburban, and what's more they had good credit. I didn't see a problem renting to them.
The girls started their business online using Craig's list and Kijiji. Things grew from there. Another guy in the building even got a tattoo. Their rates were cheaper than in an official parlor (less overhead maybe?) and one of the girls could draw pretty well. From the amount of traffic, it seemed they were getting quite successful.
But now what to do? No responsible property manager could allow this to go on. The girls had a residential lease. What if someone fell down the stairs or sued for hygiene problems? Although you had to admire the gumption, and the consistency with which the rent cheques came in.
In the end, the girls made it easy for me. Some weeks later they contracted bedbugs. They tagged the (previously white) walls of their apartment using spray paint. After that they had a barbeque on their (covered) balcony in a empty garbage drum using actual wood, not charcoal. Burning branches fell on the tenants below. Then one of the girls adopted a ferret. Then a rat. And a snake. And then two cats. The disinfectant now wasn't the only smell in the building. Instead of taking out their garbage, they were now hurling their bags onto the curb from the third floor.
The final insult, however, was when the girls hung halloween decorations on the bare bulbs they had replaced the light fixtures with. They started a fire in the bathroom. The door was closed, and so a shampoo bottle and the PVC shower stall melted. The only reason the building didn't catch fire was because the bathroom door was closed and so the fire had no oxygen to keep burning. At least, so the electrician said when he came to repair the burnt out hole where the light fixture once was.
Despite this, you'd be surprised what the Quebec Regie du Logement will not allow you to evict tenants for. None of these infractions seemed to warrant expulsion. At least not in any expedient way. (Trial dates for these kinds of issues take about six months). Finally, it was by pressuring the Moms that I was able to recover the apartment.
"Do you really want a lawsuit when your girls burn the place down?" I asked in one of my weekly conversations to one of the Moms. I think that did it.
The best part: the parents actually paid the full bill for the damages done by their kids, without me even having to go to the rental board. In the end, the place was almost in better shape once they left!
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