Before Guestville Apartments Inc. bought 80 Guestville Ave., Peter Rodriguez had lived there peacefully with his family for over a decade.
After the building near Eglinton Ave. and Weston Rd. changed hands in 2023, Rodriguez says tenants on the first floor began receiving various notices of entry and disruption to services like heat and water with no more than 24 hours’ warning. A few months later, the same happened to tenants on the second floor. Then to the ones on third.
“It was like a wave approach,” Rodriguez, a 50-year-old research coordinator at St. Michael’s Hospital and father of two teenage children, tells The Grind.
Then, in June 2024, a slew of tenants, including Rodriguez, received a letter saying the landlord was starting “a major renovation project” and had “no choice but to end” their leases by the end of October. They were offered $6,000 to leave on their own by July 31 — otherwise they’d only receive a little over $3,000, or the equivalent of three months’ rent, as per the Residential Tenancies Act.
Landlord disrupted services for tenants who stayed
The landlord then ramped things up by interrupting or cutting off tenants’ hot water and/or heat — without notice — on at least eight different days that December, including through the holidays, said Rodriguez.
Between then and July of this year, Rodriguez received at least five more letters from the landlord: a notice to vacate due to rent arrears in January; a rent increase in February; an update to the banking policy in April; a notice to remove their AC unit or pay an extra $50 on July 14; and a final notice to vacate 15 days later, for not having removed the AC.
“Even right now, as we speak, I don’t have heat in my apartment,” Rodriguez told The Grind in October.
He says that many of his neighbours left the building because the landlord’s conduct caused them frustration and stress.
The tenants that remained, however, organized as the 80 Guestville Avenue Tenants’ Association and took their fight to the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB). They fought their landlord’s applications to renovict them, and filed their own application against him.
In January, the LTB ruled that they were allowed to stay in their units. The renoviction applications were refused after one of the tenant’s lawyers argued the landlord didn’t have the permits to do the planned renovations.
In October, the tenants introduced evidence that led the LTB to name Michael Klein as their landlord. The tenants are also arguing that Klein has a history of bad faith evictions in other apartment complexes.
Apart from seeking to dismiss their eviction notices, they are seeking a fine against Klein of $10,000 per tenant and rent abatements of 50 per cent for the last 12 months.
The LTB ordered Klein to appear at the next hearing to defend himself. If he doesn’t, the tenants’ evidence against him could be accepted at face value.
‘Kind of a really big deal’
The order for Klein to appear “is kind of a really big deal,” Chiara Padovani said in a video posted to Instagram after the ruling. Padovani is the co-founder of the York South-Weston Tenant Union.
“Guys like Michael Klein always hide behind these corporate entities in order to evade any personal responsibility for their conduct and the pain and suffering that they cause,” she said.
The board’s decision also allows tenants to bring up other cases — in other Klein-controlled buildings — where he has tried to evict tenants using the same tactics in order to prove a pattern of bad-faith evictions.
“That adds an extra layer of protection for all the Michael Klein tenants for when he tries to do this again,” Padovani explains to The Grind, “because he will already have a precedent that shows that he’s a bad-faith evictor.”
Though the decision can be appealed, Klein will have to wait for a final decision and order first.
Neither Klein nor the lawyers representing Guestville Apartments Inc. at the Oct. 21 hearing responded to The Grind’s requests for comment.
Until now, Klein has avoided accountability. One of his tenants told GuelphToday last year that when she had a flood and called the numbers he’d provided, one was out of service and the other went to the wrong person. She described him as a “ghost.”
Klein owns hundreds of units across Ontario
Klein has become known for using numbered companies and evicting tenants from buildings in Toronto, Cambridge, Guelph, Kitchener, Hamilton and Lindsay for the purpose of doing renovations. The process is known as “renoviction,” because tenants are often denied their right to return to their units at the same price as before, meaning that landlords can use the tactic just to hike rents.
“Michael Klein has made renovictions his business,” a report by the advocacy group ACORN argued in 2024. The report estimated that Klein was in the process of trying to evict about 1,750 low-income tenants from 680 units at the time.
Tenants’ power is growing
For Rodriguez, the LTB’s order for Klein to appear is a “bittersweet victory” because they want the case to be resolved once and for all.
But it’ll be worth it, he says, if Klein actually faces them in person.
“I think it will be good for him to see the people behind his renovictions,” he says. “I’m not sure if he will feel something — hopefully he does — but it will bring him down to earth … to see the faces of the people that he will be kicking out of the building.”
Although it will take several months before the tenants of 80 Guestville Ave. attend their final hearing, Padovani says this latest decision is “just another indication [that] we’re going to win.”
“Not only are we going to win at the LTB, but we’re winning in terms of building up tenant power in all of the Michael Klein buildings.”
This article appeared in the 2025 Dec – 2026 Jan issue.
