Emergency shelter deal with hotelier under fresh scrutiny
The placement of new emergency shelter clients at two properties run by a Vanier hotel owner — whose arrangement with the city previously faced scrutiny by the office of the auditor general — has been temporarily suspended while the city investigates concerns about poor living conditions.
The city's one-of-a-kind arrangement with the Ottawa Inn and its owner, Ahmed Syed has been in place for five years.
The deal, which costs the city more than $3,000 per unit per month to house homeless families, has persisted despite opposition by the local city councillor and in the surrounding neighbourhood, where concerns exist about the welfare of these families and how public dollars are being spent.
“If there are any deficiencies, then we want to make sure that they're addressed before we place anybody else there,” said Shelley VanBuskirk, the city's housing director, about the investigation. “We're managing our relationship with the provider, and making sure that the families' health and welfare is paramount and top of mind.”
As they do with other hotels and motels across the city, staff place households in need of emergency shelter in rooms at Syed's Montreal Road hotel when the city-operated and community shelter system is at capacity.
What's different, however, is that families are also placed in off-site apartments away from the hotel proper. There they live without leases, often for months at a time, and at $109 per night, a significantly higher cost than these units would command if rented on the private market.
That this arrangement continues “is a scandal to me,” said Rideau-Vanier's Coun. Mathieu Fleury, whose concerns about the city's dealings with the Ottawa Inn were first published in the Citizen in early 2019, and helped launch an investigation by the city's auditor general, which neither condemned nor endorsed the arrangement.
“This is, in my mind, careless all around. Careless around the public diligence of money, the actual housing needs of those families, their ability to have rights and to have a key to a unit,” Fleury said.
Meanwhile, some Vanier residents have joined him in voicing concerns about Syed's U-shaped residential complex in the middle of their neighbourhood, which is currently housing 20 homeless families.
Thanks to more frequent dog-walking in the COVID-19 era, local resident Alison Melia said she has slowly gotten to know some of the children who play outside the apartments, sometimes in the street. What she heard from them about conditions in their temporary homes — rats, cockroaches — disturbed her enough that she posted in the community Facebook group, trying to start a brainstorm about how neighbours could help improve the situation for these families. Melia has also become close to one family in particular, sharing her daughters' hand-me-downs and delivering food for Thanksgiving dinner.
“I just wanted them to feel supported,” Melia said. “I don't think anyone should have to live in those circumstances.”
Area resident Jenni Campbell, a lawyer and former Ottawa Citizen reporter, said she's observed an upswing in community conversation about the apartments.
“I can only speak for myself, of course, but I get the sense that there's a lot of resentment in the neighbourhood towards the city for having made this sort of a deal,” Campbell said. “There are lots of really wonderful small landlords … to think that all of these people never had a shot, never had an opportunity. Or other services, public services, who could provide more care and just a better standard of living to vulnerable people.”
Syed, meanwhile, describes himself as a businessman who has helped clean up the neighbourhood through the renovation of “condemned buildings and former crack houses” for use as emergency housing, helping vulnerable families and saving taxpayers money by providing furnished apartments instead of multiple hotel rooms.
In a statement provided by his son Manzoor in response to questions from the Citizen, Syed said the Ottawa Inn has a service contract with a pest-control company for both the hotel and the off-site location, and spends thousands of dollars monthly to try to maintain a pest-free living environment. Efforts are ongoing to eradicate the occasional cockroach, he says, and work has been done to try to prevent rats from entering the building following a nearby burst pipe.
“I can proudly say we have a seen a significant decrease in all pests and have very little activity nowadays,” said Syed, who also noted that “many clients do not clean up their units and choose to live in unsanitary conditions, making it difficult for us to maintain the cleanliness of these units.”
Syed attributes any neighbourhood ill will toward his property to NIMBYism from a “local and often intolerant minority” and says he's been subjected to a “relentless harassment campaign” by Coun. Fleury.
“There is and always will be a need for emergency housing. We are concerned with the activities and actions of Councillor Mathieu Fleury (who) seems to be turning against a local business (which creates jobs in his ward) for his own political purposes. His actions are marginalizing vulnerable families.”
While Fleury doesn't believe Ottawa taxpayers would support their money being used to fund the city's arrangement with Syed, neither they nor Fleury have much say in the matter. City staff have the delegated authority to execute and amend agreements with hotel and motel providers offering temporary emergency accommodations.
Both housing services and Syed describe a need for their continuing arrangement, given the demand for family shelter placement and the stark alternatives that homeless families would face if overflow units weren't made available to them.
They also argue it's a better deal for families and taxpayers, in that these units provide more living space and kitchen amenities than a traditional hotel room, and in a single apartment, can accommodate large families who would otherwise require multiple hotel rooms.
“I do not think there is anything wrong with our arrangement,” VanBuskirk said.
“When you look at the AG report, it was very clear that the city has the authority to enter into these agreements. It found that the rate was competitive with other hotels and motels that we're using. And the AG report did not state for the city to stop using the apartment-style units.”
Auditor general Ken Hughes's 2019 report showed that the city spent $24.5 million to shelter families in hotels, motels and post-secondary institutions between 2015 and 2018, with the annual spend increasing every year. The Ottawa Inn took in more than 37 per cent of the money, a total of $9.2 million.
At the time, the AG recommended that the city consider whether the procurement of new non-profit or city-owned shelter space was justified, considering the cost of projected shelter demand.
“There is no assurance that this is the most efficient option for the taxpayer,” Hughes later said. “You can see that the demand is radically different than it was a number of years ago, and when your demand changes significantly, looking at alternatives makes perfect sense in our mind.”
In Fleury's eyes, there's an issue here that goes deeper than what he still believes is a problematic arrangement with one hotelier. He has concerns about the city's reliance on hotels and motels for emergency housing more generally, and speaking with the Citizen, shared frustration about what he perceives as a lack of urgency on the part of housing staff to go beyond just ensuring families have a roof over their heads.
“We have families that are on the street. They need housing. We end up putting them in units, we can debate if those are the right units or unit. But fundamentally, they don't have leases. And we're paying a lot of money.”
VanBuskirk said that on average, families stay at the Ottawa Inn and its off-site apartments for about four months. The barriers that exist to moving families out of emergency shelter and into permanent housing are numerous, she said, and housing staff have been working with “creativity and ingenuity” to overcome them.
“But the pressures and the demand continue to increase.”
Is there another solution? Fleury thinks so, and described a vision for temporary emergency accommodations that doesn't involve a new shelter, hotels or off-site residential accommodations.
“If I were the boss,” said Fleury, he would adopt a model called “head leasing” that would see the city, independently or through a partner agency, procure rental agreements with private landlords and then sublease those units to families in need of emergency shelter. This approach could start with the households at Syed's apartments, said Fleury, and expand to serve others that city and community shelters don't currently have room to accommodate.
This would include families like Alain Kabenga's.
Originally from the Congo, Kabenga lived for six years as a refugee in Uganda before arriving in Canada in 2017 with his wife and three children. They had their own rental when they first got to Ottawa, but found themselves unable to afford living there while Kabenga and his wife attended school, in the hopes of improving their job prospects.
After losing their home, they were housed first in a motel room and then at Syed's apartments, where they've been living for a year and eight months. The latter is a step up, with its own kitchen and two bedrooms, but Kabenga said he prays for a house for his family, where he and his wife can have some privacy (they currently sleep in the living room) and ideally, their two sons don't have to bunk together.
Laid off when the pandemic hit, he's hoping to return to work as a cleaner at Carleton University, while his wife trains as a PSW and works to get her high school diploma.
“After here, if we go to a house, that's going to be a new life … a new start.”
On Fleury's head-lease proposal, VanBuskirk said she has indicated to the councillor that he can use available legislative mechanisms to make additions to housing services' work plan for the remainder of the council term.
As for criticism of her team's handling of the Ottawa Inn file, she said she can understand why some taxpayers are aghast when they compare the monthly cost of one of the apartments with the rent it would fetch on the private market. But these aren't being used as rentals, she noted, and in paying to use these units for temporary accommodations, the city gets additional services such as cleaning and linens.
“Ultimately, I'm going to do the right thing and I think right now, when you look at the demand in the community and the need — whether it's people migrating to Ottawa from within Canada, or international migration, or families destabilizing locally — I want to make sure that families have a safe place to go … and that we're not turning families away,” VanBuskirk said.
“I think our use, right now, is a better outcome for families in terms of the space, the cooking facilities and the reduced cost to taxpayers.”
Fleury, for his part, feels staff have brushed off his concerns.
“Are you ever wrong?” he questions. “I'm recognizing four or five different elements that are just — they're in the grey. Maybe we don't agree on all of them, but there's got to be some elements that I'm right on, and you're not proposing any fix, any solution. What is your role?”
I think our use, right now, is a better outcome for families in terms of the space, the cooking facilities and the reduced cost to taxpayers.