The RentSafe Owen Sound Collaborative is reaching out to housing providers and tenants to get a better picture of rental housing conditions and concerns in Owen Sound. The Collaborative, a voluntary collaboration of agencies, community organizations, landlords and tenants working to support healthy and dignified housing, is launching an online survey of landlords and property managers this week, to be followed by a similar survey with tenants later this fall.

The Collaborative hopes that, taken together, the surveys will shed light on the issues and challenges that housing providers and tenants are facing. The results will be publicly shared to support community dialogue on possible actions to improve housing conditions for tenants and better support landlords in maintaining safe and healthy rental units.

The first survey, an online survey of landlords and property managers who own or manage rental housing in Owen Sound, will launch on Wednesday, September 15th and remain open until the end of October. The survey invites landlords and property managers, including private market, non-profit and social housing, to share their views on range of issues. Questions ask about their challenges with maintaining units, experiences involving tenants, such as concerns about tenant mental health, experiences with enforcement agencies or the Landlord & Tenant Board, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey is anonymous and takes approximately 12-15 minutes to complete.

The surveys are being developed by members of the RentSafe Owen Sound Collaborative, based in part on a City of Montreal tenant survey on rental housing conditions. The surveys are presented as a joint initiative of the Grey Bruce Health Unit, the Bruce Grey Poverty Task Force, Community Voices, and RentSafe, and are being conducted in collaboration with researchers at the University of Ottawa.

Since October 2019, participants of the RentSafe Owen Sound Collaborative have been tackling housing inadequacy through research and finding new ways of working together toward potential solutions. For more information and to access the survey link, visit www.rentsafe.ca/owen-sound.

source: media release