Last Updated on: 4th June 2020, 10:29 am
No, not all of them. Calm down. But these jagoffs who are refusing to apply for the government’s rent relief programs to help struggling tenants can feel free to rot in whatever murky evils lurk underneath hell.
I get it. Nobody likes a hit to their bottom line. But stop and do the math, guys. Losing some of the money now might hurt, but it’s going to hurt a whole lot less than losing all of the money when everything closes and your big dumb building is sitting empty for months because nobody can afford to operate is going to hurt.
In recent weeks, Ford has repeatedly called on “greedy landlords” to take part in the federal government’s rent relief program, which offers eligible commercial property owners 75 per cent of what they would normally collect for rent from their tenants.
A recent report by the Globe and Mail indicates that since the program opened last week, only 16,000 landlords of the country’s 1.2 million small businesses have agreed to take part in the program.
Ford is doing a lot of tough guy prick swinging here, but he’s not wrong when he says that there are landlords who won’t apply for it. I’ve heard more than one interview with a business owner who explicitly said that they’ve been told by their landlords that they won’t be applying for any sort of relief that may become available. That’s shortsighted, greedy, malicious garbage.
Also garbage is any landlord, residential or commercial, who raises rents this year when lease terms come up. People are struggling. They’ll be struggling for a long time. Hold off on the increases for a year. It’s just the right thing to do. It won’t kill you. And none of this forcing a month to month lease on people so you can swoop in and bump it up at a moment’s notice bullshit, either. It’s one thing if a tenant requests it, but otherwise, it’s got to be a business as usual annual lease. Nobody should want to be the one throwing people out into a harsh market at the most uncertain of times.