Tenants slam substandard public housing in western Nunavut town

At the Oct. 9 AGM of the Cambridge Bay Housing Association, Iona Maksagak asks why tenants who trash their units aren’t evicted sooner. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Sandra Mathers, manager of the Cambridge Bay Housing Association, speaks to the association’s Oct. 9 AGM, next to Mike Lozowski, a manager at the Nunavut Housing Corp., and Sigbert Creese, district controller at the NHC. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

CAMBRIDGE BAY — Picture shoveling snow out of your house every morning just so you can get outside into the bitter cold where even more snow awaits shoveling.

Or using your unheated porch as a bedroom because there’s no other space to sleep in your overcrowded home.

These are among the many disturbing tales generated by the poor state of public housing in the western Nunavut town of Cambridge Bay, which tenants shared at the Oct. 8 annual general meeting of the Cambridge Bay Housing Authority.

The many deficiencies cited at the meeting include broken doors and windows, holes in walls, leaky water heaters, frozen sewage systems, poor insulation and mold.

One woman described how the four children who live in her overcrowded unit head into her bedroom in the morning to warm up before they get dressed for school — because the rest of the dwelling is too cold.

“We asked and asked and asked for repairs,” she said at the AGM, held in the Luke Novoligak community hall — but nothing has been done, she said.

Another young man described how his mother lights candles all over their house when the sewage stench inside gets too strong.

But the major problem affecting nearly everyone in public housing remains overcrowding, made much worse by a lack of public housing in Cambridge Bay, where there only 280 units to go around in the community of about 1,700, where the majority of people still live in public housing.

A young man stood up at the AGM to talk about how he’s now forced to go from house to house to find a place to sleep because he doesn’t have a home of his own.

He said he didn’t understand why he can’t move higher up on the list for public housing after a two-year wait — once he was near the top, then he fell to three and now he’s at 11 on the list, he said.

That would put him out of the running for a space in a new $4-million, 10-plex now under construction, whose eight two-bedroom and two one-bedrooms units, which will be ready in 2015, won’t go far in solving Cambridge Bay’s housing crisis.

At the AGM, the housing association, which is running a deficit of about $1.5 million so far in 2014 — and recently received yet another new manager, Sandra Mathers — had its own beefs to share: unpaid rent and costly tenant damages.

“We’re still in the hole quite a bit,” Mathers said, referring to $2 million-debt owed by the housing association to the Nunavut Housing Corp., which gives the association about $1.3 million a year for public housing.

“Virtually all our debt to the NHC is from tenants and former tenants not paying their rent.”

New measures to collect rent include frequent notices for unpaid rent, submission of debts to collection agencies, and referrals to pay up or get evicted.

The accumulated amount owed by tenants for damages stood at $165,363 in 2013, according to financial statements discussed at the AGM, with another $45,000 in damages racked up to date in 2014.

Fixing holes in walls and broken doors costs a lot, the housing association manager said. That further limits the ability of the housing association to carry out repairs, although five houses did undergo renovations in 2013.

During the lengthy question period, tenant Iona Maksagak said the housing association needs to boot out bad tenants who trash their dwellings so that good potential tenants can move in.

“What happened to the idea of educating tenants? Why is it so hard to evict them? It’s unbelievable,” she said.

Another speaker, Harry Maksagak, recommended establishing a “sweat equity” program, which would see tenants who abuse their units work to fix them.

“We’re all ears if you can figure out a way,” said Mathers, who was interested, but skeptical that such a plan could work.

But Mathers promised to look at problems and suggestions raised at the meeting, noting down the addresses of people who lodged complaints.

For those living in substandard public housing, there was also information about the rental discounts available to tenants who live in poor conditions.

Despite draws for door prizes, from start to finish the mood at the AGM was somber.

First, there were complaints about the lack of Inuinnaqtun translation at the meeting, then, in addition to the many who complained about the state of their housing, a complaint about the poor Inuinnaqtun tenant service at the association.

After listening to the comments at the AGM, a man rose to say that the association is lucky that a housing or health inspector has never visited Cambridge Bay to condemn many of the public housing units in town.