His house was so full of junk that he slept in the bathtub.
Such was the finding of firefighters called this month to the three-storey walk-up of a Toronto man who had amassed so many possessions that he could not exit his home in an emergency. They had walked into the domain of an urban hoarder.
While privacy and funding issues make the prevalence of hoarding difficult to assess, experts believe that the behaviour exists in every Canadian neighbourhood, across every socio-economic stratum. And despite the efforts of myriad municipal agencies working to contain the threat hoarding poses to public safety, the little-understood behaviour continues to dog an untold number of citizens.
The Office of the Ontario Fire Marshal has examined four hoarding fires since January, including one that forced the removal of 1,200 residents from a midtown high-rise after a huge quantity of legal papers and computer equipment began to smoulder in a unit at 200 Wellesley St. E.
“There is a real balance between an individual’s right to have their home as their castle and the point at which that lifestyle and the accumulation of [stuff] actually poses a threat to others in the community and to the fire service,” spokesman Chris Williams said.
Damage to the 712-unit concrete-slab towers was so severe that renters living on the floors above and below the compromised units will not be able to return to their homes for several more months.
“Boy oh boy, when you see what happens in the context of a high-rise fire, it fundamentally changes your approach to considering an individual’s right to accumulate combustibles,” Mr. Williams said.
No single group in Toronto is tasked with tracking instances of hoarding although a variety of city housing agencies and psychiatrists believe that such data would be an important first step in successfully tackling the problem. An array of organizations typically become involved with hoarders once the effects of their behaviour have been made apparent.
Because hoarding is often revealed accidentally – when officials respond to emergencies – academics suggest that available statistics are conservative and do not accurately reflect how widespread the problem is.
Elaine Birchall, an Ottawa-based hoarding-intervention expert, estimates that 2.5 per cent of the general population can be classified as hoarders.
Carl Maroney, the co-owner of a private, Toronto-based company called Extreme Cleanup, keeps his own records and says that, after four years in business, his company is receiving up to 40 calls a week for hoarding-related cleanup jobs – more than his crews can manage.
“It’s out there,” Mr. Maroney said. “It’s one of those things that it’s out there, but it’s not mentioned.”
He acknowledged that his numbers are not scientific, but he remains confident that anyone in his line of work would agree that hoarding is much more common than the average person assumes. “If you talk to anybody who services inside an apartment, you’d get some ridiculous numbers [of hoarders]. We do what we do. We’re only on a small scale, visiting a fraction of the city.”
Mr. Maroney believes that many hoarders escape detection because the only recourse of landlords – or those most likely to be aware of a hoarding problem – is to call on the city for the enforcement of lax bylaws about how many possessions or animals are considered excessive.
Tenants use provisions in the Tenancy Act to prevent municipal agencies from entering their homes for a cleanup and in turn force the burden onto emergency responders who enter dwellings once lives have been put at risk.
