Ottawa Sun – Sunday, Nov 29, 2009

Doug Hempstead, Sun Media, doug.hempstead@sunmedia.ca

Organization key to rights says activist

Wheelchair-bound Ottawa Housing tenant Lana Wong says she routinely puts up with loud neighbours, break-ins and seen at least one death threat.

“It goes right through your head,” she said of the noise. “All your picture frames fall down, your dogs howl, your babies wake up and even the cockroaches run out of the house.”

She and several dozen other tenants gathered at City Hall yesterday to voice their concerns and learn about their rights in the third annual Ottawa Tenants’ Conference.

The main focus of the event was supposed to be financial – but most of the frustrated tenants, like Wong, wanted answers of safety and security.

Kicking in window

“Perfect example was last night,” said Beausoleil Tenants’ Association member Susan Spencer. “(I) had someone in my backyard, trying to kick in my window. I called security and security says we don’t have anybody.”

Senior Greg Gauthier, of the Blackburn Hamlet Community Association, said he’s been having success fighting crime in suburbia by partnering with police.

“We’ve got down to two break-ins this year and we’ve got the drug dealers out. Its a lot of work,” he said.

Spencer sees Gauthier’s success story as an example of non-community housing tenants – like those in Blackburn Hamlet getting more attention due to what she perceives as discrimination.

If that’s the case, Housing Help tenant advocate Rob MacDonald said, tenants need to organize to fight for their rights.

“People in social housing have just as much a concern about who their neighbours are and the kind of environment they want to raise their children in as anyone else,” he said.

The solution to crime and social housing, he added, can’t only be found through evictions, but through meetings like yesterday’. He said a unified tenant voice calling for more addiction centres would be a big step toward curbing crime in social housing.

But MacDonald sees finances as a bigger issue. He said tenants also don’t bring their voice to taxation issues like the proposed harmonized sales tax, because many of them don’t see property taxes as an issue that affects them.

“Tenants actually pay 70% more property taxes than a homeowner in a comparable unit,” he said. “That’s a message we want to get out to tenants is these issues do affect them.”