Rebecca Pilgrim, 24, chooses to sleep in the living room after her apartment’s bedroom was quarantined.Chris Young
Somewhere along the 14th floor hallway of the high rise at 390 Dawes Rd., a flattened cockroach sticks to the wall like a shadow. "That's been there for a year," said Rebecca Pilgrim, a 24-year-old tenant. "This is the best hallway in this building. This is the cleanest." A few metres away is a rat hole.
The high rise is one of 1,000 privately owned rental towers in Toronto that, according to a new United Way report, are becoming increasingly decrepit.
Ms. Pilgrim, who moved into her apartment with her boyfriend and one-year-old son a year ago, said she didn't know how bad the living conditions would be.
She said her family doesn't sleep in the apartment's only bedroom since it had to be quarantined for two months because of a mould problem. The plastic sheets that once blocked the bedroom door are gone now, but Ms. Pilgrim still chooses to sleep in the living room.
Pointing to patched-up water stains on the ceiling, she said a sewage pipe had burst and poured down through the drywall - into the bathroom, into her bedroom. Urine was dripping from the ceiling, she added.
The building is managed by MetCap Living, a company that won the Golden Cockroach award for worst landlord of 2010 last summer.
MetCap Living president Brent Merrill told The Globe and Mail that landlords are facing new financial challenges that make it more difficult to balance budgets - more difficult to make "cosmetic" repairs. He blames the HST, which is not recoverable for residential landlords. Combined with inflation, they're seeing about a 10 per cent increase in costs, he said, and only a 0.7 per cent increase in revenue.
"I hate to say this, but it's the government," Mr. Merrill said. "If your revenue doesn't go up, and your expenses are going up like 10 per cent, what gives? What gives for a landlord? He has to cut back on capital."
Ms. Pilgrim said she's filed multiple work orders, often for the same problems. When MetCap responds, she's rarely satisfied with the workmanship.
But the problems, she said, are everywhere.
The window frame in her bedroom, for example, isn't properly sealed. She said that when it rains, she needs to put out buckets to catch leaking water. And sometimes on colder days, when the heating isn't working well, she uses the oven to help warm the place.