Ottawa ACORN Launches “Housing Horror Stories” Report!
Posted August 29, 2019
ACORN members gathered today at the Somerset West Community Health Centre to participate in the launch of our new report, “Housing Horror Stories!”
Posted August 29, 2019
ACORN members gathered today at the Somerset West Community Health Centre to participate in the launch of our new report, “Housing Horror Stories!” The report is a collection of 24 stories of ACORN members living with everything from mold, bedbugs and cockroaches to broken elevators, flooding, and absentee landlords.
Unfortunately, there are many more stories than the ones included in our report and across our city. Common themes across these stories include:
- Poor housing conditions both exacerbate and cause physical and mental health issues.
- Renting from a bad landlord is expensive – many tenants talked about having to pay for new furniture or repairs out of their own pockets!
- Bad housing is particularly hard for people with disabilities as many experienced issues with being locked in their apartments when elevators weren’t working or entrances/sidewalks not being plowed in the winter
- Some tenants did get repairs but the repairs were not done well or when it came to bug treatment kept coming back
- 3 of the tenants who shared their stories in this report were from Herongat and detailed their experience of Timbercreek refusing to do repairs before using it as an excuse to demolish and mass evict families. Two other members living outside of Herongate had similar experiences.
- Bad housing is a CITYWIDE problem. Tenants who shared their stories were everywhere from the West End, to Little Italy, to Orleans.
The City is currently doing a review on regulating rentals and we want to ensure they know that tenants NEED landlord licensing for safe, healthy homes. Fill out the city’s survey before Sept 4th and make a comment saying that you support ACORN’s landlord licensing campaign here
Press:
Ottawa Citizen: Low income advocacy group asks city for new landlord regulations