Stigmatized homes - you rented THAT place?

In the early 1990s, a friend scored an unbelievable deal on an apartment in lower Manhattan. While the East Village was hardly the gentrified playground of privilege it has become today, it still wasn’t cheap. Everyone was envious that he’d managed to find a real one-bedroom for a good couple hundred dollars less than anyone else in the neighbourhood was paying. Until the night he hosted his first dinner party, and a guest inquired,

“Isn’t this where Daniel Rakowitz chopped up his girlfriend?”

“Who?” our oblivious friend responded. He’d spent the summer and fall semester abroad, and had remained blissfully unaware of the story of the Tompkins Square Butcher. Sure enough, within hours neighbours confirmed what they’d figured he knew all along – he was living in the scene of a particularly horrible crime. He stayed, of course – this was Manhattan.

While the housing situation up here isn’t quite that desperate, Canadians can take little comfort from the law in such cases. If you discover that you’re the resident of any one of these so called “stigmatized homes” – the preferred industry euphemism for such dwellings – there’s not much you can do while you’re leasing. Even in Quebec – the only province with legislation in place that requires property owners to divulge the details of crimes committed on the premises to prospective buyers – the law doesn’t extend to renters, who may never be aware of their homes’ scary histories.

Take the lucky chap currently occupying Apartment 208 of 5720 Decarie Boulevard in Montreal, for example. That’s where Luka Magnotta brutally murdered international student Jun Lin with a pickaxe, before posting a video of the deed online and mailing various parts of his victim to the headquarters of the Conservative and Liberal parties of Canada. According to the current occupant’s landlord, who obviously knows the unit’s history, the current tenant is “a foreigner.“ He felt no need to disclose the information up front, saying the tenant would “find out because people talk.”

Renters in the Niagara area needn’t worry about ending up in the Port Dalhousie apartment once occupied by Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka – the Bayview Drive property was demolished due to its stigma in 2005, and a new house with a different street number built on the same lot. Yet Karla’s family home on Dundonald Street in St. Catharines – where the pair murdered her younger sister in the basement in 1990 – sold quickly when it hit the market in 2009, possibly because her mother had remained in the house.

In some cases, property owners are eager to move on as soon as the police tape comes down. The Calgary home at 11 Butler Crescent, where five young people died in a stabbing attack at a house party in April last year was listed by July, and a public uproar followed, with one city councillor going so far as to propose the municipality purchase the property and turn it into a park for the comfort of current neighbours and future residents. (The house was purchased and remains standing.)

New renters of a house in Glanbrook, south of Hamilton, were recently horrified to learn that not only did they inherit the former tenants’ belongings, but those same tenants were also found dead in the home in a manner police now view as “suspicious.” Their landlord had not disclosed the deaths, which were discovered on March 11 of this year, when he rented the place again for occupancy starting April 1. He did offer them a refund of $400, which is depressingly generous given that the law requires him to do nothing.

Notorious murders and deaths aside, there are still plenty of ways a home can be stigmatized. The vast majority of entries on the crowd-sourced website housecreep.com detail former marijuana grow operations, and Toronto has housed its fair share. One such operation comprised 11 separate apartments in a building at 157-165 Jameson Avenue. Prospective tenants could probably expect a contact high just from breathing the air!

Neighbours in the popular Wolseley area of Winnipeg were surprised to learn that a Stiles Street residence in their close-knit community had apparently been housing a full-scale brothel and dungeon for a number of years. The former madam now lives in Vancouver, and her infamous home has presumably been renovated to disguise its formerly very distinguishing features.

So how can you avoid unwittingly renting a crime scene? Renting through a licensed realtor may help, as most real estate agents adhere to a professional code of ethics that requires them to divulge all known information about a home. Asking why the current tenant is leaving is always a good idea, although it’s important to remember that landlords and property managers are under no obligation to reveal anything scandalous.

Your best bets are to keep your eyes open for visual clues when viewing apartments – leftover tinfoil on the windows, stubborn red stains in the carpet – and to talk to the neighbours. They’ll likely be more than willing to dish the dirt, whether you really want to hear it or not.