Fed up with waiting for their homes to be repaired, residents of the Greystone public housing district have decided to unify their voices and fight for one another.
“My biggest thing right now is trying to help the tenants help themselves,” said Sylvia White, a resident who’s lived in the community nearly all her life.
She remembers when housing issues weren’t such a struggle for the neighbourhood.
“This community almost feels like it’s forgotten, it used to be a really thriving area back in the early ’70s, but now there’s a lot of people here who are terrified they’ll lose their home if they speak up,” White said.
The district falls under the Metropolitan Regional Housing Authority and is supposed to provide residents with affordable and safe housing.
But many people living in the area feel like their homes are anything but safe due to numerous issues like mold and rodent infestations.
“The back floor by my door is rotted and full of mold,” said Tammy Corbin, another resident.
When Hurricane Arthur hit Nova Scotia in 2014, her down spout was blown off the exterior back side of her house.
It still hasn’t been repaired, and water leaks through her back door onto her floor.
“What does it feel like? It feels like we’re nothing, like they don’t care,” she said.
The housing authority says it’s recognized the need to fix the laundry list of repairs and are working to do so.
“At this point we’re focusing on moving forward. We’ve got a number of staff that are being brought on and more staff are set to be brought on,” said Janet Burt-Gerrans, general manager of the Metropolitan Regional Housing Authority.
“We’ve gone through a process of searching and bringing on some more capacity to tackle the issues. We’ve got contractors that have been working over the past few weeks and we’ve got some more coming.”
White and other concerned residents have formed a group, Greystone Maintenance, to address the needs of their community.
They’ve created a repair request form and are hand delivering them to every house in their district. The forms give residents a chance to outline their repair needs, in order of importance.
“If the Housing Authority doesn’t respond to these repairs I’m going to personally walk each and every tenant who wants to put their rent in trust with the tenancy board, I’m going to walk them through how to do it,” White said.
White says the trust will be held by the Residential Tenancies Act and will stay there until the repairs are completed by the housing authority.
The Housing Authority says they are taking necessary action to catch up with the back log of work orders.