Tenants in Golden Equity-managed building in Scarborough say conditions are ‘inhumane’

It’s been five years since Heather Clark and her three children were able to move out of a shelter and into a rental apartment building on Markham Road in Scarborough, managed by Golden Equity properties.

Since she moved in, she says the property management company has done nothing to maintain the unit.

“They haven’t repaired one thing in five years in my apartment,” she tells CityNews.

“There is mold, there’s mice. It’s so bad my kids can’t sleep. They’ve missed school. Two [of my kids] moved out because of all the mice at night. The balcony is not repaired. The ceiling in the bathroom is about to cave in. The vents are not working.”

Heather suffers from stage four COPD, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and says doctors have given her a grave prognosis.

“I have five years or less to live,” she says, adding that the mold, mice droppings and dander are exacerbating her condition and are detrimental to her already fragile health.

Numerous service requests have not been attended to, and Heather says her family is living in squalor because of the negligence.

“I put work orders in. They say they don’t get them. Then I talk to the superintendent, the super says they’re so backed up in work orders that they don’t know what to do anymore,” she says.

“Every time I cook, I have to wipe and bleach the counters. There’s mouse feces all over my counters, on my stove. They come out of my bathtub. It’s disgusting. I shouldn’t have to live like this. It’s inhumane.”

Heather’s partner, Jonathan, says he recently joined the tenant advocacy group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to find support in his fight to make the building livable. He conducted an impromptu survey of residents in the building to see how widespread the issue is.

“From the 16th floor to the first floor, I got over a hundred ‘yeses’ … that they have the same mice or cockroaches, bugs, all these same issues, and nobody fixing it. They’ve been living with it the whole time,” he says.

Heather is on social assistance and is currently in arrears for a partial portion of unpaid rent, but says the unit was already in a poor state well before those problems began. Jonathan says that makes it even harder to get repairs done, despite the landlord having a duty to maintain the property irrespective of landlord/tenant disputes.

“There’s no response while you’re in a dispute at the Landlord and Tenant Board. It’s like a stalemate. They don’t look at you when you pass in the lobby. They don’t come to your door. They stick an envelope under your door once in a while, and that’s how they communicate,” says Jonathan.

“It really has affected my mental health, my quality of life. It’s hard some days just to get by in this building … it’s not a home at all. It’s barely just survival.”

Khadijah Al-Maqdisy has lived in the same building for more than 30 years and has always paid her rent on time. She says that doesn’t make any difference when it comes to getting Golden Equity to take action and make timely repairs.

She says she’s been fighting for various fixes periodically since the 1990s. In ’98, she managed to get leaking ceilings and water-soaked floors repaired, gathering 120 signatures from building residents and advocating for them before the property standards authorities at City Hall.

In 2017, Khadijah’s kitchen was in an advanced state of dilapidation with a broken stove top, cabinets that were falling apart and water damage throughout. After repeated requests that fell on deaf ears, she also joined ACORN because she says this time around, “I wasn’t up to fight alone.”

“They wanted us to move to another apartment and pay market rent. They didn’t want to fix it at all until ACORN stepped in.”

CityNews has covered tenant issues at buildings owned by Golden Equity Properties multiple times, ranging from a lack of maintenance and pest control to wrongful eviction notices.

The company is based in Montreal but owns more than a dozen buildings in Toronto. They did not respond to CityNews’ request for comment.

Golden Equity eventually renovated Khadijah’s kitchen in 2023, after ACORN was able to engage with the City of Toronto’s RentSafeTO program, which is meant to enforce bylaws and ensure compliance with maintenance standards.

“ACORN gathered many repair requests from many tenants and sent them in as a group. So that made RentSafeTO pay attention and consider it,” says Khadijah.

She feels RentSafeTO is ineffective, and the officers charged with enforcing the bylaws are disinterested in advocating for tenants. She has been trying to get severely water-damaged flooring in her unit repaired since last year, and despite months of follow-up, has seen no progress.

CityNews reached out to the City of Toronto about both Heather’s and Khadijah’s units. They responded saying they have received no service requests from either unit.

“The City is not able to access these units without the permission and express request of the apartment resident. City staff will be attending the property today to follow up with the tenants and ensure they are aware of the reporting protocols. We encourage you, as the reporter to indicate to those in contact with you to please file a service request with 3-1-1 so that we can do an investigation on a particular unit within a property,” they said in a statement.

Heather and Jonathan say they have submitted service requests dating back to 2023.

Khadijah forwarded several emails to CityNews, detailing her service requests to the RentSafeTO ward officer in charge of her building. It shows that when she followed up four months after her initial request, she received a reply saying the ward officer had changed. Her email to the new ward officer was not acknowledged, and no repairs have been done to date.

Calls to overhaul RentSafeTO

Khadijah says her interactions with RentSafeTO officers have been extremely unpleasant, calling them condescending and rude, adding that tenants aren’t updated about their cases or who is handling them, and they often fall through the cracks.

“RentSafeTO is constantly changing officers, which creates a major issue for tenants. The officers rarely follow up on cases, leaving tenants in the dark about the progress of their complaints. When an officer is reassigned, tenants are left to figure out who the new officer is, as RentSafeTO doesn’t notify us of these changes. It feels as if they simply abandon us. Each time a new officer is assigned, we have to start from scratch,” she says.

She adds that the City has the authority, through RentSafeTO, to conduct necessary repairs and bill the landlord when they do not respond to repeated requests, but is very reluctant to undertake such remedial action.

She also feels that RentSafeTO’s rating formula is deeply flawed, with her building getting a score of 81 per cent. Meanwhile, she says the basement parking garage regularly floods, numerous units are dealing with mice and insect infestations, and there’s a large bulge in the hallway ceiling outside her front door, clearly indicative of an unchecked leak.

At a glance, the rating system involves three evaluation categories – high, moderate and low risk. Each category has a number of items listed, each of which is scored from one to three, with three being the highest score.

However, all items in all categories are weighted equally, which means something like scuffing on hallway floors is given the same weight as a balcony railing being loose and unsafe. Scoring high on items that are arguably less vital to health and safety, but lower on items directly related to those concerns, could still result in a high overall score.

Councillor Josh Matlow, who spearheaded the creation of the RentSafeTO program in 2017, agrees that the rating system is impractical.

“When we approved RentSafeTO, we approved what we expect staff to then go and operationalize. How it’s been operationalized – I’ve heard consistently from people I work with very closely on the ground, like Federation Of Metro Tenants’ Associations, ACORN and others – it isn’t working in practice,” Matlow tells CityNews.

“I’ve moved motions that have failed here … of having color-coded signs like DineSafe for RentSafe – to have to put it right in the window, showing not only the tenants who live there today, but prospective tenants, what they might be walking into to choose as a home – whether it be green, yellow, or red. Is this a place that a landlord is taking care of, not just as a business, but as somebody who’s responsible for people’s homes?”

Matlow used to chair a Tenant Issues Committee which was dismantled under Mayor John Tory’s administration.

“I’m very happy to say that this new mayor has agreed with me that we need to strike a new tenants’ committee,” he said.

Matlow says through the reconvened committee he hopes to continue to advocate for accountability and improvements in the RentSafeTO program.