Tenants Of Halifax Apartment Block Say Their Protest Worked, But Why Was It Necessary?
HALIFAX — Last month, tenants of a Spryfield apartment block held a protest against their landlord for what they said were poor living conditions.
Residents of the “500 Block” of apartments on Herring Cove Road said they were living with rotten floors, holes in ceilings and walls, black mold, broken doors and windows, and persistent pest infestations.
They claimed MetCap Living, the property management company responsible for the buildings, was delaying or outright ignoring their requests for fixes.
About a month later, those residents say their protest worked and most of the issues at the buildings have been fixed.
However, questions remain around how the problems got so bad, why they’ve been so persistent, and why it took a public protest to get them fixed.
‘They just showed up and started fixing things’
Patrick Donovan is a 500 Block resident and one of the original protestors.
Donovan, who lives at 536 Herring Cove Road, says conditions in his building improved significantly after he and his neighbours held their protest.
About a week after the demonstration, workers descended on the building and undertook a series of repairs: holes in the walls were patched, ripped-up flooring was fixed, and his unit was treated for pests.
“They just showed up and started fixing things,” Donovan told Huddle. “I guess you could call what we did a success.”
LeighAnne Kenney, who lives at 538 Herring Cove Road and had black mold in her bathroom, said many of the problems in her building were also fixed.
“I’m really happy about it,” she said. “It looks more appealing: no more plaster or paint falling down in the bathtub or on the floor.”
She said she was surprised to see things fixed so quickly and chalks the quick action up to the protest.
Donovan added that he was proud of his neighbours for demanding action in a way that was both constructive, and ultimately effective.
“I feel very good about it. Especially [because] we wanted things fixed but we don’t want to see them go out of business,” he said.
Both Kenney and Donovan say things still aren’t perfect in their buildings, but both feel much better—and safer—now that basic repairs have happened.
Kenney said she is also hopeful there will now be better communication between MetCap and residents.
‘Living there was the worst experience of my life’
Although the most recent spate of problems appears fixed, the MetCap-run apartments have a history of being plagued by significant issues.
One resident, who asked to remain anonymous, lived at 536 Herring Cove Road for almost four years, beginning in 2017, said the management was “absolutely horrible.”
She told Huddle she lived for years with broken windows and electrical outlets, and “constant bedbug and cockroach infestations” which she had to spend $1,000 of her own money to fight.
Calls to property managers were ignored, or she was forced through complicated processes to request basic fixes. By the time she was finally able to move, she said she had lost 90 percent of her things to infestations.
“Living there was the worst experience of my life,” she said.
MetCap did not respond to Huddle’s request for an interview. However, when residents first held their demonstration spokesperson Michael Guyette told Huddle in an email the company is “proud of the buildings we manage.”
Guyette said there are “many ways residents can communicate with us and our team to get things done,” including work orders or a customer service line,” and said MetCap is “committed” to completing work orders on a timely basis.
How Halifax’s landlords are policed
The Halifax Reginal Municipality is responsible for ensuring buildings in the municipality are kept safe and habitable. The city does this through two types of inspections: fire safety inspections, and inspections under the M-200 bylaw, which lays out basic requirements for safe living conditions.
When inspectors find a problem, they issue an order to the property owner requiring them to fix it. But how often do those issues get fixed? And how many issues does the city never even learn about?
Matt Covey is the fire and prevention division chief with Halifax Fire and former manager of building standards with the HRM.
He says there are a couple of factors that might lead to issues going unresolved. Nearly half of renters in HRM don’t even know what the M-200 bylaw is. And those that do are sometimes reluctant to call on the city for help.
“I’m sure there are a lot of tenants out there that report problems [to their landlords] and don’t get service. But they don’t want to involve the city and they don’t want to complicate things,” he says.
It could be they work and can’t find the time to be home for an inspector. Maybe they are uncomfortable navigating the bureaucracy of the city, or simply don’t want to get inspectors involved.
Nevertheless, Covey says the city still gets about 800 M-200 requests a year. And those, he says, are all handled.
“When it comes to M-200s we hear about, [people wonder] how many of them actually get addressed. The answer to that, for me, is trivial: they all do. Nothing slips through our fingers,” Covey says.
Some tenants might not be happy with how the issue was resolved, he says, but nothing gets closed in the system unless the city feels it’s been handled.
Of course, a closed request doesn’t always mean the problem is fixed. Covey says the city will follow up with tenants to the best of its ability once an order of remedy has been issued. But sometimes they simply never hear from them again.
In those cases, the city can’t know for sure the issue was resolved. Covey says the cases are kept on file and will be considered if problems at the same building come up again.
Dealing with repeat offenders
So what happens to owners who routinely flout repair orders? Covey says it’s up to the city to decide how to deal with them.
However, he says the goal of inspections is first and foremost compliance: the city generally isn’t out to “catch” or punish bad actors, just ensure that people have safe homes to live in.
To that end, the city will work with property owners as much as possible to get things fixed. Usually, they will give owners a month or more of notice before showing up for an inspection.
“We work with them to understand that they need to do what we need them to do,” he says. After all, a problem fixed under
the threat of inspection is still a problem fixed.
However, if owners don’t listen, the city can escalate its orders.
Instead of treating pests in a specific unit, for example, the owner might have to provide a pest control plan for the whole building, undersigned by a qualified company, with timelines about how they will address the issue.
The M-200 bylaw does allow for the city to take a non-complying property owner to court; however, Covey says that is “very uncommon.”
He says he’s seen only a handful of cases make it that far in the five or six years he’s been with the city.
The language in the M-200 bylaw is quite clear and if an owner is violating it “there’s really no escaping” making a fix, he says.
Owners are typically cooperative, Covey says, because “they know we carry a sledgehammer in our back pocket.”
Repairs at the 500 Block
In the case of the most recent set of complaints at the 500 Block, Covey says he sent inspectors to the building a little more than a week after residents staged their protest.
“We’ve deployed a lot of resources at the 500 block in response to the concerns that that were brought to our attention,” he says.
Inspectors came back with a few minor issues, but nothing glaring.
“These are very experienced, quality inspectors I’ve got in there so it’s unlikely that they missed anything,” he says.
Residents of the 500 Block say a flurry of work was completed shortly after they held their demonstration, just before Covey says he sent in his inspectors. His first inspectors to arrive also saw workers in the buildings painting the walls.
Although the 500 Block residents’ action got them many of the fixes they were looking for, Covey admits it’s not ideal to have landlords shirking repairs only until inspectors are on their doorstep.
“That’s not what I want to see,” he says. “Obviously I don’t want to see reactive owners, I want to see proactive owners, but we have to call it like we see it.”
Making inspections even more effective
Covey says most landlords are good. But for others, prolonging repairs and letting their buildings deteriorate is a deliberate choice.
“There are some owners that will view it as a business decision. If they’ve got 10 leaky windows, they could roll the dice and just leave those windows leaky and … hope that none of the tenants go through residential tenancies for some kind of a solution,” he says.
“The question is, at what point does the city, you know, start to take an aggressive position where we make it even more punitive to be in violation?”
Covey says the M-200 bylaw is a good bylaw that accomplished what it’s supposed to. However, he thinks there are some ways to make it even more effective.
He’d like to see the bylaw require owners to track tenants’ complaints and better communicate things like power and water disconnections.
He’d also like to see the city “legislate proactivity,” requiring owners to have things like a pest control program, cleanliness program, and state-of-repair program.
He also thinks tenant responsibilities should be written into the law.
An owner can only do so much to control pests, for example, if tenants are keeping their units in a state that allows pests to proliferate. Covey admits, however, he’s not entirely comfortable legislating what people do in their own homes.
Covey also thinks the city could more to track tenant requests, so inspectors can draw on past instances when addressing new ones. He’s already working on making that happen.
“What we’re doing right now is documenting our education and calling up the violations that we see and making sure that we’re confident we’ve given an owner every single opportunity to be compliant,” he says.
That way, if inspectors find evidence owners are letting their buildings fall into disrepair and only fixing things up just before they arrive, they can skip a few steps and ticket them immediately.
Right now, Covey says he “[doesn’t] have confidence in what we have in the system to do that.”
Trevor Nichols is a staff writer with Huddle in Halifax. Send him an e-mail with your story suggestions: [email protected].