Many of city’s poor facing ‘dire’ housing situation, professor says
A Saskatoon mother and her son who were forced to spend five nights sleeping outside after health inspectors deemed their squalid west-side apartment unfit for human habitation are just one example of what a University of Saskatchewan researcher calls the “the underbelly to the boom that Saskatchewan has experienced in recent years.”
“I think lots of people have been doing very well but that has definitely not extended to the clients that we work with,” said Sarah Buhler, an associate professor at the university’s College of Law who assists at Community Legal Services for Saskatoon Inner City Inc. (CLASSIC), a non-profit that provides basic legal services to Saskatoon’s poorest residents.
CLASSIC opened 723 files last year, of which 151, or 21 per cent, involved residential tenancy disputes, according to the organization’s latest annual report. Buhler said that doesn’t begin to reflect the true number of people facing a “dire” housing situation in the city, as a majority of cases don’t come to the attention of agencies like CLASSIC or the broader community.
“Many, many people will just try to deal with it themselves. They just move out to try and escape some of these conditions, or just put up with it because they have nowhere else to go,” Buhler said. She said most of the people she interviewed for an ongoing research project about access to the government-run Office of Residential Tenancies had no choice but homelessness.
Those who choose to stay face situations like those encountered by Mary-Ann and Jonathan McLeod.
The mother and son moved into the converted garage on May 1, and spent the next four-and-ahalf months sleeping on the floor, wrapped in blankets to fend off the cold and the cockroaches. A local housing organization and rental company subsequently found them a new apartment.
“We’re embarrassed,” Mary-Ann McLeod said of the apartment for which they paid $918 per month — half of what she and her son received from the government’s Saskatchewan Assured Income for Disability (SAID) program. That money bought them a suite with a broken, boarded-up window, a rudimentary bathroom and a scorched stove, unusable because of a frayed power cord.
The McLeods’ situation isn’t surprising to CLASSIC executive director Chantelle Johnson, who during her half-decade at the nonprofit has heard countless stories about bedbug, cockroach and rat infestations, as well as landlords who make a habit of harassing tenants — many of whom are on social assistance — or coercing them into having sex.
“Lots of folks live without heat,” she said. “We’ve had clients who only came to us when the oven stopped working because the landlord told them to just turn the oven on and open the door to heat their suite with little kids running around. We have clients with no running water who are living in garden sheds and using a five-gallon bucket to go to the bathroom.”
The problems don’t stop there. Johnson said homelessness, or the threat of homelessness, puts immense stress on organizations like CLASSIC — which struggle to attract the necessary funding — as well as the legal system. Anyone who loses their home could be in breach of court conditions, she noted. Buhler, meanwhile, said poor living conditions can lead to serious social and health issues.
Buhler attributed the problems, which affect the working poor as well as those drawing benefits from the government, to factors such as growing wealth disparity, the trauma caused by colonialism and the simple fact that finding a decent place to live for $750 per month or less remains difficult. The solution, she added, is less obvious but will almost certainly come from the community.
“Sometimes, when you live in a place that’s generally good for a lot of people to live in, it’s easier to become apathetic,” Johnson said. “It’s easier to live in a bubble and not scratch the surface to see what else is out there … (The McLeods) are two people but this is a reality for so many people in Saskatoon.”