Thousands of Toronto children will wake up tomorrow morning in hopes of finding a few nice gifts under the Christmas tree.
But Saleiban Mohamoud and Fathia Obsiye, and their six young sons, would be content to get heating in all the bedrooms of the subsidized east-end townhouse they rent from the Toronto Community Housing Corporation.
The family took possession in early November, having moved to the 460-unit Blake-Boultbee public housing complex near Pape and Gerrard from a tidy but cramped two-bedroom apartment in another subsidized building in St. James Town.
They'd been on a waiting list for a larger unit for almost a decade, but were given priority status last year after the birth of twin sons. Most of the 65,000 people currently on the waiting list just to get into subsidized housing will wait even longer -- the average is nine to 18 years.
The four-bedroom townhouse had received a fresh coat of paint, as well as new kitchen cabinets, a stove and a fridge. Despite those improvements, the family says they found the unit in atrocious shape. They say it was infested with cockroaches and rats. The closet doors were missing, and some windows were broken. The plumbing leaked. There were holes in the walls. Heaps of junk were strewn in the backyard and in the filthy crawl space beneath the laundry room.
Nothing prepared them, however, for what they discovered in the heating ducts: garbage, dirty diapers, condom wrappers, juice boxes, dead mice, all crammed in so deep that the technician with the first of two duct-cleaning companies they were forced to hire said he'd never seen anything like it in 25 years in the business.
After first seeing the appalling condition of the townhouse in late October, Mr. Mohamoud, 43, says he complained and was told he could take it or leave it because other families were waiting who would be prepared to move in.
He also begged the St. James Town managers to allow his family to stay in their apartment an extra week so he'd have time to clean up the new place.
But they refused and changed the locks.
"I wouldn't say that's an appropriate response," TCHC chief operating officer Neiko Nakamura said when told of the episode. "It should have been, 'How do we get the unit ready so the tenant feels comfortable to move in?'
"There are probably lots of things we could have done differently or communicated better to the tenants."
"It's jaw-dropping to think that the city would have people living in a place like this," says Lori McDougall, an editor and former British Broadcasting Corp. project manager in India who occasionally hires Ms. Obsiye as a babysitter. She loaned the family $1,500 to make the townhouse habitable. They hired duct cleaners, junk haulers, an exterminator, a plumber and bought clean linoleum for the kitchen floor.
"We've gone apartment-hunting in Calcutta," she says, "and this was worse than any place I'd seen there."
The unit had been occupied for several years by a large family who neighbours say had been neglecting the property, but it had been vacant since the summer. Their situation was well known among other Blake-Boultbee tenants and local community workers.
Almost two months after the Mohamoud-Obisye family moved in, two of the four bedrooms have no heat, probably because of damage to the ducts. The four older sons -- ages 12, 10, 8 and 5 -- live in one bedroom, while the couple and their two 14-month-olds live in another.
"The kids don't have a place to do their homework," says Mr. Mohamoud, a taxi driver who immigrated to Canada from Mogadishu, Somalia, in the late 1980s. "They can't sleep. When they see the rats, they cry and come on my bed. We live like a nightmare."
The family pays $300 a month for the home. Mr. Mohamoud earns about $60 a day, refuses to go on welfare and ferries his four older children to a community tutoring agency after school.
The family has very little furniture, but the children are neatly dressed. Mr. Mohamoud says he feels helpless.
"I am afraid of losing this place. Believe me, if I could have a better place than this one, I would."
Mr. Mohamoud says he reported all the problems he discovered. "They visited the housing office more than a dozen times" to complain about the dirt and the heat, adds Ms. McDougall, whose photos of the townhouse were given to the Globe. "You wonder what [TCHC staff]were doing."
Mr. Mohamoud has a Nov. 21, 2005, work order drawn up by Del Management Solutions, the Tridel subsidiary that manages the property on behalf of TCHC. It confirms that two bedrooms have no heat. Del did not respond to a request for an interview.
According to TCHC policy, the private firms with contracts to manage about 10,000 of the city's 58,000 public housing units are responsible for auditing the work of their sub-contractors, while TCHC officials perform random spot checks.
TCHC officials were told the apartment, with its new kitchen fixtures, had been suitably repaired -- the report was backed by grainy photos taken by the property managers -- and now insist that Mr. Mohamoud never came forward with his concerns.
"All this work was done before they moved in," says TCHC spokesperson Bill Ward.
Mr. Ward adds that the unit was inspected in the fall.
After The Globe and Mail began making inquiries earlier this week, housing officials contacted Mr. Mohamoud and Ms. Obsiye, offering to repair the heating ducts and address any other outstanding problems.
"This doesn't generally happen at Blake-Boultbee," comments city councillor Paula Fletcher, who sits on the TCHC board and whose office handles many cases involving tenants being evicted from public housing complexes. "Things usually happen pretty smoothly over there."
Which begs the question: Was this one family's surreal experience the exception or the rule?
April Lee, who has lived in a townhouse in the Blake-Boultbee complex for 31 years and is one of the tenant representatives, says she's never had problems getting things fixed.
The office turns over repair requests in a couple of days, and the exterminators come out on a regular basis.
And heating? "My place is nice and warm."
Rod Cohen, who has operated a small youth outreach centre across the street since 1989, says the two current property managers at Blake Boultbee are hard-working and dedicated individuals, but adds that the staffing levels dropped noticeably several years ago.
The Mohamoud-Obsiye family's experience also raises questions about how the TCHC monitors the performance of the handful of private property management companies with contracts to maintain TCHC housing units.
Ms. Fletcher says the agency has begun to roll out a computerized tracking system so tenants can check the status of work orders.
All of which is literally cold comfort to the Mr. Mohamoud and his family. As he recounts, one official he dealt with brusquely informed him that the townhouse "will never be perfect. Take it or leave it."
"I cannot leave it," he says, and reaches for a suitable analogy: "The hungry person who doesn't have anything to eat: If you give him a 10-day-old doughnut, they'll eat it. They don't have a choice."
Troubles ahead?
Whether due to mismanagement, hard-living, chronic underfunding or a combination of these, the deterioration of public housing is a ticking time bomb, both financial and domestic.
The TCHC owns about 58,000 units in 350 complexes. Its 164,000 tenants earn an average of $19,795, and their collective rent -- which is geared to income -- accounts for only about half of the agency's $561-million operating budget. The TCHC sets aside about $68-million a year for capital repairs, an amount that hasn't changed for several years, according to the board's 2005-2007 community management plan.
The agency says it needs $908-million for capital improvements over the next decade, but this figure also includes $224-million that's needed "immediately" to address a backlog of deferred maintenance and repairs identified by an audit this year. Like most of the 19 Ontario Housing complexes downloaded to municipalities by the provincial government in 1998, the 36-year-old Blake Boultbee complex is in "major need" of refurbishment, says TCHC chief operating officer Neiko Nakamura. In 2006, she says, its tenants will see plumbing and heating improvements, new doors, windows and flooring, and exterior work on deteriorating balconies and roofs. But Ms. Nakamura acknowledges the $6.7-million earmarked likely won't cover everything.
Local politicians implicate budget shortfalls that date back to decisions made by the Mike Harris government in the late 1990s. But some say the problems go back much further. "The whole question of the quality of the existing stock is a sleeper issue," says housing activist and NDP candidate Michael Shapcott.
City councillor and TCHC board member Paula Fletcher points to a Walpole Avenue public housing complex that was built on an old garbage dump and now suffers from shifting foundations and methane gas leaks. Other complexes were fitted with electric baseboard heaters that now need replacing because many tenants can't afford to pay the skyrocketing utility bills. "This is the nature of the housing," she says.
Only very recently have public housing officials begun to pay attention to the "state-of-good-repair" approach to prioritized budgeting (properly maintaining existing assets before undertaking expansions) that's been adopted by municipal agencies like the TTC, says Councillor Joe Mihevc.
Shoddy workmanship is another unwelcome legacy of an earlier era. Don Mount Court, a townhouse complex built in 1968 on Dundas Street East, was effectively condemned in 2001 because of water damage and asbestos contamination. It's now being rebuilt. Don Mount's architect, Raymond Moriyama, resigned from the project because of the Metro Toronto Housing Authority's insistence on using cheap materials.
As far back as 1990, some Blake-Boultbee residents demonstrated to protest chronically malfunctioning elevators and drafty single-pane windows that forced some tenants to use their ovens for heating. Today, the elevators work, but no one has dealt with those outdated windows.
-- John Lorinc