4 weeks and counting: tenants still without heat or hot water

Watch the video above: After four weeks without heat or hot water, there is relief in sight for some midtown apartment tenants. Mark Carcasole reports. 

TORONTO – Tenants whose apartments have been without heat or hot water for over a month now will get another few days in a hotel while their landlord, under the order of the Landlord and Tenant Board, works to fix the broken furnace.

The tenants of 2779 Yonge Street have been put up in hotel rooms while the landlord, Bianca Pollak, had contractors fix the broken furnace and install carbon monoxide detectors throughout the building.

Today’s meeting at the Landlord and Tenant Board is the third in the past month. Pollak had been ordered to fix the furnace, and then given an extension when it wasn’t fixed. It was supposed to be fixed by today. It’s not.

Pollak has, in the past, suggested the cost to fix the furnace is around $100,000.

The tenants have been without heat or hot water since mid-February. They were given space heaters but some residents complained they weren’t sufficient.

Her lawyer argued she didn’t have the money to pay for both the repairs to the furnace and her tenants’ hotel accommodations.

But that’s not good enough for some tenants.

”I don’t think that’s acceptable,” Andrew Gallagher said.

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "I don't think that's acceptable," Andrew Gallagher said.

Isabel Gana, another tenant, echoed Gallagher and said she was still shivering while in her apartment during warmer weather earlier this week.

City bylaws require landlords to keep their building heated to at least 21 degrees Celsius from September 15 to June 1.

Watch: Mark Carcasole has been reporting on this story since Feb 21. See all of his stories below.

Tenants have previously accused Pollak of trying to push them out. She has a development proposal ongoing for the building that she hopes to tear down and replace with a mid-storey condo.

Pollak has tried to make some concessions. She’s offered some tenants space in her other two buildings and offered them rental spaces in the new building should it ever be built.

Gallagher stayed in one of her buildings on Strathgowan Avenue and claimed there was broken glass and the back door was broken.

“We want to stick to our ground; we want our heat and hot water back,” Gana said.

“We certainly believe that she’s wanting us to get out so she can start building.”

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "We certainly believe that she's wanting us to get out so she can start building."

In February, Pollak told an adjudicator at the Landlord and Tenant Board the broken furnace, a previous power outage and other necessary repairs only prove the “building should be replaced with something new.”