‘I left that place to be homeless again’
Man says apartment city helped him find was worse than the street
In downtown Toronto, behind a public library there is a small park where James Ribble would sometimes go to sleep.
Last summer, he spent many nights on the grass, his backpack clutched to his chest.
When it rained he would lie on cardboard on an elevated grate so water wouldn’t collect beneath him. On it, someone had written in black marker: “I am high. I am low. I am cold with nowhere to go.”
A few months later, Ribble, 52, did have somewhere to go: a publicly subsidized basement apartment on Coxwell Ave. that cost $950 a month and which he tried to make his home. He found the place through a city-run program designed to get vulnerable people into housing.
For four months, Ribble lived in the damp, dirty, graffiti-covered basement punctured with cracks and holes, many sloppily patched with crumbling spray foam. “I left that place to be homeless again,” he says.
Ribble is one of thousands of people who struggle to find a place to live in Toronto, where for many even the worst apartments are too expensive.
“Clearly no one inspected this before it got recommended to a person who was vulnerable.” COUNCILLOR JANET DAVIS
The Star followed his case for four months, to understand how, despite city programs, support workers and help paying rent, he ended up back on the street.
On Dec. 30, he packed up his turquoise-and-purple backpack, picked up his green duffel. It was -2 C and snow covered the ground.
“I’ll manage,” Ribble says, heading for the door. “Like I said, I am only taking what I can carry. Even that is too much, but I’ll get by.”
Ribble spent the next three months in city shelters and drop-ins, at Out of the Cold programs, or with friends.
“I just prefer to stay outside, because I don’t have the temperament to deal with some of these guys (in shelters) anymore,” he says, behind the library in March.
Ribble grew up in Regent Park and lived in Toronto for most of his life. He once worked as a unionized drywall taper, earning $80,000 a year, he says, and often enjoyed an afterwork martini.
He suffers from clinical depression and says he ended up in the system after his skull was “split in half” during an attack with a pipe in Regent Park some 20 years back.
Drug addiction, he says, has helped keep him on the street.
When he’s been high, he’s stolen things, or threatened a family member. When he’s been caught, he’s pleaded guilty. He’s entered rehabilitation.
He’s been sent to rooming houses, which are ridden with drugs and crime. The cycle repeats. Frustration fuels his temper. He has yelled at staff at the Scott Mission. They have kicked him out temporarily, several times.
No matter what a person has done or where they have been, he says, everybody deserves a clean and safe place to live, to recover.
Ribble says everybody asks, if the apartment was so bad, why did he move in?
For him, the question is why was the landlord allowed to rent it out in the first place?
Last summer, Ribble slept outside until a rainy spell forced him indoors.
“It’s cold. I’m soaking wet. I have to walk around in wet clothes all day, because stuff in my bag is wet,” says Ribble.
He went to a city-run, multi-service hub at Peter and Richmond Sts. where people get help finding a shelter or housing. There, he says, he was connected to Streets to Homes, who sent him to the house on Coxwell.
The program has helped 5,500 people find homes since 2005. Almost 90 per cent of clients stay for more than a year and everybody is offered additional supports to help them stay housed, said Patricia Anderson, with the city’s shelter, support and housing administration division, in an email. Those followup services were audited in 2014, and they are working to implement the recommendations, she says.
Housing workers help identify affordable units and educate tenants on their rights and responsibilities. Workers recommend they go with people to view apartments, but the decision to rent is entirely up to the tenant, although caseworkers will help with disputes, she says. There is no formal relationship with landlords, she adds.
“Streets to Homes does not vet landlords, does not check into records of landlords, does not refer cli- ents to landlords, does not sign leases, does not make decisions for clients, and does not have a list of ‘vetted’ landlords,” Anderson says. It is not uncommon for people to decide to leave a place and seek another, she says.
Nobody from the city would discuss Ribble’s case, even though he gave permission.
Ribble says he opted to go alone to see the apartment. It was filled with desks, chairs and desktop computers. Property manager Waqar Alam was painting and promised to fix it up, he says. In September, on moving day, nothing had been done, Ribble says, and it took three days to clean it out and get a look at the place.
He thought he could handle the repairs and says he asked many times for the right supplies to fix and clean it up, but only got bits of what was needed and spent hundreds on materials, cleaners and tools.
Ribble says his housing worker spoke with Alam, but that didn’t fix the issues. He has lashed out at support and housing workers. Police were called.
Alam insists he told Ribble he would make the repairs before he moved in, but he says Ribble wanted the place as is, promised to fix it up and was given supplies and money to do so. He says Ribble pulled doors off the kitchen cabinets, damaged a toilet seat and the walls, wouldn’t let him in to do work and did drugs in the apartment.
If asked, says Alam, he will do whatever a tenant needs.
The basement apartment is at the bottom of crumbling concrete steps.
A tour on Dec. 23 revealed a dingy rectangle, with white tile floors, covered in cracks and holes — around door frames, behind the stove, across the ceiling and in the closet, between the sink and the mirror and inside the bathtub.
Many were overfilled with spray foam, bulging and discoloured with age. Pieces of carpet poked through the ceiling.
Writing on every wall bled through a thin coat of paint.
Scrawling black words framed the door: “Did you notice this door is always open … I am trying to train my mind … The body has house in ruin.”
In the back bedroom, Ribble’s sleeping bag was on bare concrete. He says he pulled out mould-covered fabric, baseboards and drywall.
He kept the window open to air out the mouldy smell, but no screen meant raccoons — their paw prints visible on the walls — would creep in. He slept with a knife.
“I give them a chance to get out, but they can be nasty.”
When it rained, or snow melted, water ran down the walls. A flood from upstairs ruined his mattress, he says.
The tub was so dirty he showered at hostels and only one burner worked on the stove, he says, so he found his meals elsewhere.
At home the only way to be comfortable was to use, Ribble says.
“I know in the long run drugs and alcohol aren’t going to do that for me, aren’t going to take away the prob- lems, but it is just to try and kill it for a little bit.” A home, he says, should be a refuge. “Especially if you had a bad day and you do want to use. You can go home, you can sit down, you can eat … I couldn’t use the stove.”
Alam says he has provided good homes to people who otherwise couldn’t get housing for more than a decade, most through city housing workers.
His nephew is the owner and landlord, says Alam, who wouldn’t provide a phone number, insisting he handle questions.
In Ribble’s case there was no lease; $550 of the rent was from Ontario disability support payments and $400 from the Investment in Affordable Housing for Ontario program, a federal-provincial fund, used for a range of housing programs.
Toronto used $79.2 million from that fund, for 4,945 housing allowances, between 2011 and 2016, said a spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing.
Councillor Janet Davis says she has sought but has yet to receive a satisfactory report on all city-run supportive housing programs, including Streets to Homes. When shown photos of Ribble’s apartment, she described the unit as “appalling” and “totally unacceptable in terms of the standard of cleanliness and repair.”
It is doubly concerning, she says, that the unit was paid for by public dollars and says rigorous inspections, involving municipal licensing and standards staff, should be done before units are rented to people trying to move off the streets and into better lives.
“Clearly no one inspected this before it got recommended to a person who was vulnerable. This is a ticket to homelessness,” she says.
A new city bylaw approved in March will require the owners of buildings with three or more floors and 10 or more units to register with the city and should mean more oversight and faster repairs at bad buildings.
But those new rules won’t apply to three-storey houses with basement apartments, like the place where Ribble lived.
Alam, when asked if he would live in the basement, says yes.
He encouraged a Star reporter and photographer to tour a unit on the second floor, with a water-damaged ceiling and where a light fixture dangles from a kitchen wall.
Dead cockroaches form a ring around the fridge.
Is there a pest problem? “No, no, this is not pests,” insists Alam.
What is the block of green poison for?
A tenant pipes up: “Rats.”
The day Ribble moved out, on Dec. 30, the last thing he packed was a bottle of Tide laundry soap.
The song “Drive” by the Cars played on a radio he was leaving behind, along with a dresser, mattress, television, DVDs and a pair of ill-fitting work boots given to him by a friend.
After handing over his keys he signed a handwritten contract to end the tenancy. He was reimbursed $700 in cash for January’s rent, minus $250 for missing tools. Ribble says he didn’t take them and doesn’t know who did.
Alam counted out the $20s, $50s and a $100 bill and another tenant acted as witness.
A week later, fire inspector Chris Culleton was at the unit, scanning the walls and using his flashlight to search for cracks, holes and broken seals. The apartment had been painted, the holes filled.
“So when was the last time we were in here?” Culleton asks Alam, checking his clipboard. “About six years ago?”
Ribble had complained the unit wasn’t fire safe and had serious structural issues throughout. Alam told the Star the fire department had been in the unit early last year.
Culleton says their end game was to make sure smoke and fire can’t travel and major structural issues would be referred to other city departments.
When the patch jobs were pointed out to him, he asks Alam when he last did repairs.
Alam says, “The guy was here, he say give me the materials …”
Culleton responds, “You know the drill … It’s your responsibility and the owner’s responsibility.”
He ordered Alam to fix the seal around the furnace room door, a fire safety issue. Upstairs, the light is fixed and the bugs cleaned up.
The smoke detector in a shared hall should have been changed in 2015. There is a hole in the wall and no fire extinguisher, issues he was ordered to fix.
“If they ask me to do anything I do it right away,” says Alam. “I am not above the law.”
On April1, Alam says the apartment was empty and city licensing staff were set to return for one more inspection.
Ribble, meanwhile, is still searching for a home. “I just want someplace quiet, warm and clean,” he says. “I will work on the rest later.”
He will try to work again with Streets to Homes, because he needs help with his rent supplement.
“They have the keys to the city,” he says.