Rallying for renters
Ward 4 candidate Weeks aims to help frustrated tenants
Howard Weeks wants the city to improve living conditions for renters by protecting them from landlords who let their properties fall into disrepair.
The Ward 4 candidate in the upcoming municipal election promised to investigate the practices of city building inspectors, if he can manage to get the support from voters later this month.
Weeks announced his intentions Friday morning while visiting the home of Kari Benson, who has been living with leaky ceilings for more than a year without help from her landlord. City building inspectors issued a work order in May demanding the owner make repairs to the home on Giles Avenue, but the problems persist.
“Nearly three months past the city’s deadline, despite all of Miss Benson’s efforts, most of the work remains to be done,” Weeks said. “I believe that the citizens of Windsor are not getting the level of services and protections they deserve.”
The owners of the property, Richard Wiebe and Shawn Klassen, live in Linden, Alta. When contacted by The Star a couple weeks ago, Klassen wrote in an email that the property manager had addressed all issues brought forward by the tenant. A contractor had done the roof work and an insurance company is dealing the backed-up sewage in the basement unit, he wrote.
Benson disagrees, saying her ceiling still leaks and the sewage downstairs stinks up the entire house. She continues to file complaints with the city, but no further action has been taken, Benson said. That’s the part Weeks finds frustrating.
“I have definite concerns about the tenant advocacy system,” he said, alluding to the amount of work Benson has done to improve her situation with so few results.
Weeks says building inspectors should be doing the repairs and billing the property owners, if those landlords continue to neglect their responsibilities. But that isn’t easy to do, says the city’s new chief building official, Bill Jean.
The city can and has done repair work to homes, but only when the problem is deemed to be an emergency and the landlord has been given notice.
“The landlord has rights. We can’t just go in there and start doing things,” Jean said.
He also discussed the challenges inspectors face because of the rising number of building condition complaints received by his department. Kari’s complaint is just one of 594 filed with the city’s service centre by the end of July. That figure puts the department on pace to exceed the nearly 970 of these types of calls logged in all of 2013. The numbers have been increasing every year since the 700 reports received in 2009.
With just 10 building inspectors working city- wide, the amount of work can be overwhelming. Several weeks ago, inspectors had about 200 outstanding complaints, meaning those residents haven’t even had a visit from an inspector yet, according to inspection manager Rob Vani.
Weeks said he wants to better understand the workload of inspectors to make sure no one is waiting weeks or even months before having their complaints addressed.