Victoria home goes from family abode to drug den
When John rented his Victoria family home to a newly divorced mother of two kids, who said she just needed a place to get back on her feet, it seemed like the ideal situation.
“The police are unable to get involved. And the Residential Tenancy Branch is weighted so heavily against landlords, it's nearly impossible to remove tenants, even if there is an immediate threat to the neighborhood and property.” Not all landlords will be good landlords. And not all tenants will be good tenants. But when something goes horribly wrong, as it did in John’s case, destroying a home, the problem is that the tenancy system is full of loopholes, delays and opportunities to be exploited by the bad actors involved.
One of the men escorted out told John, “We’ll be back.” And he was, for days, part of a crew trying to break into the house. At one point, on July 12, the same man threatened neighbours with a Taser. John later found a large supply of what appeared to be crack cocaine and fentanyl hidden away in a bedroom closet, which he surmised was why the gangsters kept trying to return. He said he had to spend $1,000 a day to hire private security just to keep the house – and exasperated neighbours – safe.
John found himself in the middle of several overlapping policy problems in British Columbia today: A tenancy system ripe for abuse, a mental health and addictions system not able to protect those who need it as they slide into crisis, and criminal justice rules that leave police unable to intervene in the earliest stages of what is clearly an organized crime situation because it’s considered a tenancy dispute.
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