This city is rife with lying landlords.

• Example 1.: After viewing an apartment Elaine mentions that the hallway smelled of urine. The landlord says, "Really, I hadn't noticed"… meanwhile, a metre away, I am reading a notice on the lobby cork-board written by said landlord, admonishing tenants for letting pets urinate in the hall. Nope.
• Example 2.: Viewed an apartment that was still occupied by people with housekeeping skills one step below 12th-century Scottish pig farmers that would bring the livestock inside the house to keep the pigs from freezing in the winter, where we're told how great the apartment will be once it is vacant and the landlord has a chance to fix things up, promising new paint, refinished floor, new kitchen cupboards and other things. We come back to look again after the pig farmers are out and the sum total of the work is a half-assed paint job and the apartment actually looks worse now that there aren't piles of garbage hiding the floor. Nope.

Now, in fairness, I can understand how an endless stream of filthy tenants of the sort who think things like putting a dog in the hall to shit is "letting it out" and "cleaning" means piling the garbage in the corner could wear down a landlord into not wanting maintain things rather than have them ruined over and over. Tenants like this are as much a part of the problem of finding decent, fairly priced rentals in this city as all the other things that are usually (and rightly) blamed. It makes an unfortunate kind of sense to leaving a perfectly good home bought as an investment empty rather than open it up as a pigsty-for-hire. It's an impenetrable closed loop of greed and stupidity that wraps around rental housing in Vancouver, making things all but impossible for good, conscientious renters looking for a decent home.