‘To raise kids is very expensive . . . It’s very, very hard in Toronto’

The heap of bricks and rubble that sits on a pedestrian path below Rassel Mohammad’s fourth-floor apartment is the latest reminder of the Scarborough father’s struggles to pull his young family out of poverty.

Last Saturday, four storeys of brick facing above the unit fell from the side of the problem-plagued Eglinton Ave. E. public housing building.

This is after two winters of little or no heat because of a faulty boiler and ongoing issues with burst pipes, ruined flooring, a broken stove and no phone service in his three-bedroom apartment, Mohammad says.

“We would really like to move, but on my wages, it’s just not possible.”

Mohammad, 36, struggles to support his pregnant wife, their 3-year-old daughter and his 60-year-old mother on his wages as a shipper/receiver at a Don Mills factory. He earns $15.81 an hour — about $32,000 a year — in his permanent, full-time job, which he’s had for the past 13 years.

“To raise kids is very expensive with the clothing, the diapers and the food. It’s very, very hard in Toronto,” says Mohammad, a member of ACORN, a national group of lowand moderate-income residents that supports the living wage concept. Mohammad, whose family moved to Canada from Bangladesh when he was 12, began supporting his mother and three younger brothers when he graduated from high school and his father died suddenly.

“We lived on social assistance. But when my father died, I took my family off social assistance by working,” he says.

He has been working ever since. It doesn’t make sense for his wife to work, Mohammad says, because her wages wouldn’t cover the cost of child care, and his mother is too frail to look after small children.

He is grateful for his subsidized rent of $830 a month, but every pay raise means a rent hike in his public housing building, so it’s hard to get ahead.

“Everything goes up — food, rent, TTC fares — everything except the pay,” he says.

“If I had more money, I would buy a car and save money to buy a house or a condo. Then we could live in a better place and have a better life.”