A nasty infestation of angry voters crowded outside the office of Liberal MLA Joanne Bernard this week, looking for help. The minister of community services remained inside.
The political pestering was from supporters and residents of 101 Nova Court, who have had to live with cockroaches and bedbugs for years now. The rally was organized with the help of anti-poverty organization ACORN, who say years of empty promises about improving public housing has gone on long enough.
“I’ve seen pictures of what some of [the tenants] are living in,” says ACORN board member Darryl King. “Nobody needs to live in that environment. It’s dreadful.”
Dealing with an infestation, of bedbugs or other hard-to-kill critters, is a psychological wallop. For low-income renters, it’s often also an impossible situation to escape.
The housing authority has told the group that the building has and will be receiving additional pest control treatments to eliminate the creepy crawlies, but King says ACORN will still keep up the pressure, striving for a meeting with the minister. He believes this week’s protest was a good start.
“It wasn’t a huge crowd, but it was an effective crowd and our voices were heard.”
Meanwhile, farther up the food chain, one ex-renter at Victoria Gardens in Dartmouth says a terrifying rat infestation caused her to break her lease.
Deidra Williams was without any problems renting her second-floor apartment for the last couple of years, up until this summer.
The single mom of a four-year-old daughter says she first noticed squeaking in early July. Eventually, she was losing sleep to the “constant” squeals. “It sounded like a pack of small lap-dogs running around my apartment floor.”
Landlords Killam Properties brought in Braemar Pest Control to place a few traps, which did succeed in bagging a rat, but wasn’t enough to let Williams sleep soundly.
“We assured her the situation had been resolved, however she was quite upset,” says Dan Sampson, Killam’s director of property management. “Some people, understandably, get really freaked out by stuff like that.”
Sampson says Killam has pest control contacts in all their buildings, and that rodents aren’t too common. But Williams would disagree, especially after the activated rat trap wasn’t collected for three days.
“Which by then was starting to smell. Over the years of living there, only at that moment did I recognize that smell as in the building,” she says. “There have been rats here the whole time.”
Williams, who was staying with her mother until this past weekend, still isn’t happy with Killam’s treatment and says she plans to go to the residential tenancies board.
Related Stories
Groundhog cam available for Nova Scotian voyeurs
City council to look into Halifax’s rat problem
This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2014.
“A nasty infestation of angry voters crowded outside the office of Liberal MLA Joanne Bernard this week, looking for help.”
Didn’t the Herald run a picture of this…… with one person holding a sign to their window?
But yeah, it is unfortunate to be a powerless renter. The tenancy board is completely useless and has no actual power over a landlord. I’ve rented from two slumlords in Halifax and both took the same approach to my complaints. “You don’t like, well you can move”. Then of course the next unknowing person moves in to the same unresolved problems and the landlord never even misses a rent cheque. Then if you want your damage deposit back you’re screwed because you technically broke the lease early because they let you move.
Its a broken system that just gets worse 🙁
Me and my girlfriend were residents of one of there disgusting, overpriced buildings on Kent st.
The experience was unspeakable. On one occasion(of MANY) I literally came home to a rat flopping around in the toilet… Until that point they were trying to tell me that they were “field mice” (these things were damn near a foot long and very aggressive). When I asked my degenerate property manager to do something about my toilet friend, she sent the supers husband(the resident handyman) with a pair of garbage pickers over to our apartment, at which point he proceeded to drown the rat while simultaneously boxing my girlfriend in bathroom with his outreached garbage tongs(a real charmer).. After that we made a trip to their main office on Kempt Road, where we had the pleasure of dealing with an egotistical, incompetent razor thin gold chain wearing piece of trash that offered zero help or service. He merely redirected us back to our property manager, and said he would give her a call to see what was going on… after outlining the conditions of the lease we were locked into, and informing us that because they were providing sufficient pest control services(a Larry the Cable Guy looking man who came buy and tossed around a couple traps and left) that we had no reason to breach the lease..
We fought HARD to get out of the lease with absolutely ZERO help from the tenancy board.
We cleaned the piss out of what was a disgusting unit to begin with, and even gave the place a fresh coat of paint to ensure they had no reason withhold our damage deposit. During walkthrough they were purposely nitpicking(the walkthrough was conducted by the handy man hero mentioned early, who although I feel is a kind soul, is about as smart as the garbage pickers he was handling; and wouldn’t normally be capable of the malice he was displaying unless
of course he was ordered too by his boss(the property manager) who was to much of a passive aggressive pussy to conduct the walkthrough herself… The only thing he could find was a SINGLE crumb under the crisper in the fridge(which I scoured). This crumb was going to be his reason for withholding our $500 dollars… Long story short; that did not happen..
These people are slum lords in the most literal sense, and are clearly in-bed with the tenancy board. And if their not, then fuck the tenancy board anyways, because they are probably the most useless fucking wing of government we have outside of the Liquor commission and labour board. Seriously, what the fuck do they do? Have you seen the conditions of some of the places in this city? Mold, rats, bedbugs, dilapidation….This goes beyond entitlement, it’s public health problem. I pay exorbitant taxes in this country every year to ensure certain things get taken care of. Chiefly my health!!
It’s truly sickening and shining example of the growing corruption we breed in this province. And by the way if anyone is interested I have photos of ALL my experience with this property behemoth. Just let me know, I would LOVE to play a role in taking a jab at those motherfuckers.
If you would like to share your photos and increase awareness regarding that “slumlord,” then you can post pictures and reviews on Yelp.ca. Just “add company name” and the address and/or Property Management’s name, Join Yelp (of course) and whenever anybody google’s the address or the PM’s name, they’ll see your review of it/them.