Cartierville tenants living in unsanitary conditions
Unsanitary conditions found in 46 per cent of 789 Cartierville units
The north-end neighbourhood of Cartierville has long been a magnet for low-income families and newlyarrived immigrant families looking for affordable housing in Montreal.
But in too many buildings, low rent is often accompanied by unsanitary conditions that have been neglected by landlords.
Over the past year, a local housing group visited 89 apartment buildings to assess the problem and found hundreds of tenants living in abysmal conditions.
“We found cockroaches, bed bugs, mice and rats, mould and water that was leaking from the ceiling,” Charles-Hugo Desroches, one of the researchers, told the Montreal Gazette on Tuesday.
About 46 per cent of the 789 households that were visited had unsanitary conditions, said Desroches of the Comité logement Ahuntsic-Cartierville, which conducted the investigation in collaboration with the AhuntsicCartierville borough.
After researchers met with tenants, only 113 of the 789 households agreed to have their cases submitted to the borough for further investigation. Of those 113 units, 92 had cockroaches, 34 had bed bugs, 13 had rodents and 18 had mould.
Many tenants in the apartment buildings visited are economically and socially disadvantaged. About 20 per cent are unemployed and 67 per cent are recent immigrants, including some Syrian refugees.
Rémi Bureau, a researcher who worked on the study, said many tenants didn’t want to complain to the borough because they were worried about getting into a confrontation with their landlord. Others were put off by the length of time it takes for the borough to act on a complaint, often several months, and some recent immigrants “didn’t want to make waves,” Bureau said.
Dolores Gordon, who has lived in an apartment building on Ranger St. for 34 years, said she and other tenants began having problems when a new landlord purchased the building in 2006. In 2014, she had to move out of her apartment from February to August after the city forced the landlord to renovate the kitchen and bathroom because of a mould infestation.
Harout Chitilian, the city councillor for the Bordeaux-Cartierville district, said the borough and the City of Montreal’s revitalization fund paid for the study as part of a plan to educate tenants about their rights.
Chitilian also had a message for the slumlords who refuse to clean up their buildings. “Get your act together now or face all the available consequences going forward,” he said, adding that the borough recently condemned three apartment buildings in the area.
Unsanitary apartment buildings are also a problem in other neighbourhoods. In 2014, the City of Montreal launched a plan to address unsanitary housing conditions, which includes establishing standard response times for landlords to deal with problems such as mould.
The city ’s plan to fight unsanitary housing aims to improve apartment living conditions by ensuring that landlords are accountable for sanitation and structural issues.
In 2015, it increased fines for landlords who weren’t complying with sanitation bylaws — ranging from a 25 per cent hike for minor violations, to 50 per cent for neglecting tenants’ health and safety. About $217,000 in fines were issued to landlords for unsanitary conditions, but the city had received only $1,100 by the end of the 2015, as many landlords contested fines in the courts.
In Montreal, about 43 per cent of residential buildings were built before 1960 — leading to problems for renters in older buildings.
Dr. David Kaiser, of the Montreal public health department, said people who live with mould can develop respiratory diseases such as asthma, pneumonia or rhinitis — nasal inflammation that leads to a runny nose. Living with bed bugs for a lengthy period can lead to social isolation, a lack of sleep or difficulty at school, he said.
Montreal’s efforts to solve the problem have been successful on a case-by-case basis, Kaiser said. However, the percentage of households with bed bugs, cockroaches and mould hasn’t changed “by an appreciable amount” over the past few years, he added.
“We are much better equipped in 2017 to move ahead quickly in the next five years to have an impact than we were 10 years ago,” he said.