NEW WESTMINSTER — A dispute over the noisy play of an active two-year-old boy has ended in eviction for a New Westminster family.
Matt Astifan and his son, Marcus, have until Jan. 31 to find a new place to live after a Residential Tenancy Branch arbitrator sided with his neighbours and the landlord at the Shoreline development in Port Royal.
The social-media trainer is going sleepless at the thought of re-entering the rental market on just 10 days’ notice and disputes the notion that “child noise” is a legitimate reason for an eviction.
Astifan and his partner, Mary, added rugs, took Marcus outdoors more often and tried to impose an 8 p.m. bedtime. But in a letter to building management, they defended their son’s right to “developmentally normal stuff” such as running instead of walking.
“I can’t police my child to the point that there is no noise,” he said. “It’s a wood-framed building and that’s how little sound-proofing there is.”
Based on his review of the Residential Tenancy Branch’s published decisions, Astifan said evictions for child noise are rare to the point of non-existent in B.C.
Past branch decisions have found that children playing, occasionally running and even singing, are part of normal daily life — not unreasonable, and therefore not alone grounds for eviction.
The Municipal Affairs and Housing Ministry, which oversees the branch, could not say whether child noise has been grounds for evictions in the past.
While the branch handles 22,000 disputes each year, it says it does not release details of specific cases for privacy reasons.
The trouble started a year ago when the building manager informally warned Astifan not to let his son run in the halls, which Astifan agreed to curtail, according to correspondence supplied to Postmedia.
“I used to take Marcus running in the hallways when I got home from work and he would play in the lobby with his RC car to burn off some energy,” he said.
The following month another informal complaint was made by his downstairs neighbour, who complained of “stomping with shoes, dragging of things [toys] across the floor, continual running from their child, and banging that disrupts us every single day and into the late evenings.”
When those neighbours moved out, new tenants complained to management in July about the noise of a child running into the late evening. In an email to Astifan, the building manager expressed surprise that a child so young would be up after 9:30 p.m. and warned that official breach notices would follow.
A breach notice was issued in September and another in October. In between, Astifan complained to building management that his downstairs neighbour had been screaming abuse at him from his patio.
Late in November, Astifan received an eviction notice. A week later, he called the police, alleging that his downstairs neighbour was pounding on his ceiling and scaring Marcus, who turned three years old last weekend.
The eviction notice notes that Astifan was offered another suite in the building, but declined to move.
The arbitrator’s decision describes a tenancy engulfed in hostility with accusations between neighbours and between Astifan and his landlord.
The arbitrator found it “more likely than not” that Astifan himself was “purposely stomping” in his home, because the police had become involved, “even though it was [Astifan] that called the police.”
The arbitrator ruled that Astifan had interfered with or unreasonably disturbed his neighbours and that noise complaints were not addressed in a reasonable time.
A message left with the building’s owner, Aragon Properties, was not immediately returned.
