N.B. 'rent control' produces 55% increase for Bathurst senior

Marie Roy is a New Brunswick rent control success story on paper, but the 77-year-old is still in danger of losing her two-bedroom apartment. 

Roy's rent is due on Tuesday and, for the first time, the Bathurst grandmother needs to come up with $900 to pay her new landlord.

It's a 55 per cent increase from the $580 Roy has been paying, but better than the 98 per cent increase her landlord wanted to impose.

The difference is a compromise negotiated by the Residential Tenancies Tribunal, New Brunswick's rental watchdog.

"That's a big raise for me," said Roy, who has called the same Bathurst apartment building home for the past 10 years and was hoping for a better result when she asked for government help

"I am on a pension and the pension is not going up. I mean, it doesn't leave me much for food."

For Roy, $900 in rent is better than $1,150, but it is still a lot for her to pay for housing.

It will eat up more than half of the $1,700 monthly income she earns from federal Old Age Security and supplement payments and is not something she thinks she will be able to afford for very long.

She would happily move, but there are no public housing openings in the Bathurst area and vacancies in the private rental market have fallen dramatically in the past year — down to 0.3 per cent for two-bedroom units like she has now.     

Unable to find alternative housing, Roy is left struggling to find the extra $320 per month in rent she needs to pay to remain in her current apartment.

"I look on [Facebook] marketplace every day," she said. "After I pay my rent and pay my cable and everything, there's not going to be much left." 

Roy is in a personal housing crisis that developed almost overnight last summer

The six-unit building she lives in was bought and sold twice after a local couple acquired it in July for $140,000. They flipped it to Ontario investors for $300,000 five weeks later.

The Ontario owners hired a local property management company to look after the building. Within days, Roy received the notice her rent would be jumping 98 per cent to $1,150 on March 1.