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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

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In Canada approximately 70 pct of households own at least one residence, which includes owning their main residence. By the same token, approximately 30 pct rent their main residence, a percentage that may rise in old urban areas like Montreal and Toronto. Unlike real estate market in general, municipal authorities often heavily regulate rental markets. Being tenant may sometimes collide with bigger business interests of those who would like to turn apartment buildings from rental residences into privately owned condominiums. When municipal regulations don't allow such transformation, there are backdoors that make such conversion elegant and perfectly legal.

Rental buildings are owned by bigger or smaller corporations like any other type of property, with one big exception, the tenants usually stay regardless of who is the current owner. In Canada, in many cities, there are special regulations against arbitrary evictions and termination of rental contracts, which allow little or no room for big profits for the current owners short of reselling the buildings to other corporations. On the other hand, selling the building, unit by unit, may be much more profitable enterprise, provided there is a legal ground for doing it. Unfortunately there are many regulations that would make these transfers into condominiums rather difficult for the property owners. In many cases it isn't sufficient to get approval from majority of tenants that they will buy their units. In some cities there are annual quotas or even moratoriums on such conversions.

The solution for this problem is elegant and it seems it's taking off as the real estate market is either moving up or remains high and the regulatory rental mechanisms are lagging far behind the supply-demand point of equilibrium. The owner transforms the ownership into cooperative, where any share above certain minimum gives right to occupy one of the residential units. The fact that this unit is rented isn't a problem if the new co-op owner is not an owner of another residential property. In this case even the cities with toughest municipal regulations cannot forbid the new owner of claiming repossession of the residence from its current tenants. And, voila! The magic is done, the tenants are evicted and the building turns into something that isn't rental property anymore without breaking the regulations.

This process of eviction may lead to at least three different outcomes:

1. The process will go its way. Municipal regulations won't be changed. The process will die out or lose momentum after sufficient number of units is transferred into private hands. It seems hard to believe but this possible outcome looks as most likely to happen.
2. The process will be stopped and regulations will be changed in order to make more difficult turning corporate into cooperative ownership. Such move however, unless it's done wisely, will inevitably have negative effects on the way people do business in the country, reducing their economic liberties. Therefore it looks very unlikely.
3. The process will be stopped by completely liberalizing rental regulations. Corporations won't need to turn into co-ops because they will have right to sell directly units and turn into condos. This also looks unlikely given some vested interests to keep the current regime intact, among tenants as well as among municipal authorities.

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