'Out of control' system preventing troublemakers from being evicted from public housing, critic says
By BEN SPENCER, SUN MEDIA
Shoot a gun, deal drugs or assault a neighbour and your days in Toronto's public housing should be over.
"The truth is, nothing can be further from the truth," Harry Fine, a former adjudicator on the provincial body that resolves disputes between landlords and tenants, tells the Sunday Sun.
In fact, Fine insists, there's a revolving door for bad tenants in this city's troubled public housing projects.
The Toronto Community Housing Corp. evicts problem residents and the province's Landlord and Tenant Board lets them back in.
"In my informed position, the Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board is the most serious impediment to cleaning out the bad guys from social housing," Fine tells the Sun.
"The regulatory regime is out of control."
He even goes so far as to suggest the provincial board is thwarting this city's public housing landlord.
Fine knows what he's talking about. He left what was then called the Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal role in November 2004, where he was an adjudicator who represented social housing landlords before the Ontario Landlord and Tenant board in their bid to evict tenants.
Sitting in the North York office of Landmark Solutions, the company he founded in 2005, Fine represents clients regularly before the board and says public tenants routinely escape eviction through appeals to eviction orders.
"I am talking about cases where there's violence, there's drugs, there's guns and they are not being evicted," he says. "I have even seen (Toronto police) Guns and Gangs Task Force raid cases fail."
The relative helplessness of the city's public housing agency comes at a time when Terry Skelton, the woman in charge of safety at the city's community housing agency, says guns are more of a concern than at any time in the history of Toronto public housing.
There have been two high-profile shootings in Toronto's public housing projects this month -- two men and a woman shot in a Scarborough building and a pair of teens wounded in Regent Park.
The TCHC is Canada's largest social housing provider and the second largest in North America, housing some 164,000 low- and moderate-income tenants.
Not surprisingly, the city's public housing landlord is reluctant to criticize the Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board.
For one, no one -- let alone a social housing provider with a mandate for the exact opposite -- wants to be seen to be beating up on the poor.
Secondly, TCHC has its hand out for $350 million immediately and another $20 million annually it claims is needed to fix the city's decrepit public housing stock.
Attacking a government-owned agency like the Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board would be biting the hand that feeds you.
Officially, TCHC's policy is to evict tenants involved in criminal activity.
TCHC chairman David Mitchell tells the Sun it's "difficult to say" whether TCHC is being thwarted in its bid to evict troublesome tenants.
"It's due process," Mitchell says. "I think it would be a situation of you win some, you lose some."
Fine attributes much of the eviction problems to a 2003 court decision overturning the eviction of a tenant with a mental disability.
In Wolch vs Walmer Developments, the Divisional Court overturned an Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal decision that evicted the tenant for a series of illegal acts.
On review, the Court found that landlords are subject to the Human Rights Code, as is the Tribunal, in making findings, and handed out discretionary relief from eviction.
Fine says it's the "pervasive over-application" of that decision that has led to a farcical situation whereby it's often enough for a tenant to claim to have depression or anxiety in order to avoid eviction.
He says law-abiding tenants are frustrated and confused.
"They ask the landlord, 'Why don't you evict these people?' but the landlords try," he says. "Social housing could be cleaned up very easily in terms of crime but the government works hard to make sure that doesn't happen."
South of the border in Atlanta, a dramatic turn in philosophy more than a decade ago continues to pay off in the fight to rid the city's social housing of its shockingly violent streak.
In 1994, the Atlanta Housing Authority decided to start razing its housing projects and scatter the residents throughout the city using housing vouchers to help them pay their rent.
It was a deliberate move away from the Regent Park-type projects that cut the poorest people off from the rest of the population.
At the time, Atlanta was the most violent city in the U.S., and its social housing like a war zone.
One of its projects, Techwood/Clark-Howell, was 35 more times violent than the city of Atlanta itself.
Today, with its traditional public housing projects all-but reduced to rubble, crime in those precincts has fallen by as much as 95%.
Rick White has seen the transformation from the beginning, having joined the AHA at about the time the first bulldozers were brought in.
While attributing much of the drop in violence to the death of the segregated projects, White says tough regulations that ensure criminals lose their right to live in public housing have also played a significant part.
"Here is our philosophy on it," White explains from his Atlanta office. "If somebody wants to break the rules, if somebody wants to violate the law, they are certainly entitled to that.
"But what they don't have is the right to receive a government subsidy to do it.
"If you can't meet that obligation, then there is no place for you in public housing."
White says there are 20,000 people on a waiting list for public housing in Atlanta -- plenty of whom are willing to abide by the law.
For Skelter, removing guns, violence and criminals from Toronto's community housing is an ongoing battle.
She says public housing is merely a microcosm of the wider GTA, and with that GTA in the midst of a spate of violent shootings, it can't be expected to be any different.
Given its criminal element, Skelter says the removal of guns remains the responsibility of the police -- though she says TCHC is doing all it can to help.
Whether TCHC's strategies are working, well, even Skelter doesn't seem convinced.
Asked if she's confident the way TCHC is dealing with violence in its projects is having the desired effect, she says, "I think we are trying hard."
She goes on:
"I think that we are looking at every opportunity that we have from a housing organization standpoint and in partnership with other service providers and the police to address the incidents of violence in our communities."
.....
