Sunday, October 29, 2017

A battle is brewing between Ottawa city hall and residents of Vanier, Ottawa. The city has recommended a zoning change to accomodate the building of a 350-bed $50-million facility in Vanier proposed by the Salvation Army, which aims to address the needs of homeless people. Residents who met yesterday, however, believe the Housing First approach should be maintained. This followed a CBC report about a landlord who suffered a large loss after renting to a formerly homeless tenant through the Housing First Landlord Partnership Program.

The landlord found his Vanier apartment has suffered thousands of dollars of damage and was littered with flies, maggots, garbage and feces. The landlord had agreed to lease the property to the tenant as part of the Housing First program run by the City of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and the Salvation Army, meant to get Ottawa’s homeless off the streets. The landlord claimed that the agents who invited him to participate in this program misrepresented the risks involved.

The landlord, Nitin Mehra, 32, said that the Salvation Army pitched the Ottawa Housing First Landlord Partnership Program (LPP) to him, saying if he allowed the homeless man to rent one of his units, they would send a caseworker to check on him once a week and provide cleaning services. According to the Salvation Army, their sole duty is to match participants with landlords. The Salvation Army’s brochure on the program reads “The Housing Case Managers conduct a minimum of one home visit per week.”

According to Mehra, he first learned something was wrong a few months into the lease, when an appraiser reported a drop in the value of the building and asked if it had been a drug den. Mehra visited the apartment and found it covered with a “knee-deep” layer of garbage including rotten food mixed with maggots and flies. When Mehra contacted the Canadian Mental Health Association to speak with his tenant’s caseworker, he found that the caseworker had never met the tenant, which the caseworker attributed to a large caseload.

According to Mehra, in spring, a Salvation Army worker invited Mehra to participate in the LPP, but the only paperwork he signed was the lease and he was not provided with any other supporting paperwork.

“It’s a botched program,” Mehra told the press. “The city’s heart was in the right place, but they just did not execute it well at all.” Tim Richter, the CEO of Alliance to End Homelessness, said of this matter, “These kind of incidents are exceedingly, exceedingly rare.”

Mehra asked the tenant to leave and then changed the locks. The tenant is now homeless again. “Awful, shameful, embarrassed,” Mehra described the experience. “I kept up with my end of the bargain. I gave a safe, clean place to live. The city did not keep their end of the bargain at all. Now somebody’s on the street and I’m embarrassed.”

According to Mehra, a contractor estimated the cost of cleaning the apartment alone would run to C$3500, not including repairs or replacement appliances, but no one has offered to pay the costs of repair. According to executive director of Canadian Mental Health Association’s Ottawa branch, Tim Simboli, the tenant was the one responsible for the damage to the apartment.

In the meantime a 350-bed project that is intended by the Salvation Army to include 140 emergency-beds located in Vanier, is being stalled at the planning stage by objections of Vanier residents who believe the Housing First is the best solution to the homelessness problem.

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