Battle lines drawn in Heron Gate, where an evicted community doesn't plan on leaving
Taylor Blewett, Ottawa Citizen
Updated: August 14, 2018
Though visually imperceptible, a front line has been drawn along Heron Road, Baycrest Drive and Sandalwood Drive in Ottawa’s Heron Gate rental community.
It runs across the neighbourhood’s overgrown lawns and overflowing garbage bins, in front of aging townhouses from which tenants have emerged to form a coalition that proclaims “#DefendHeronGate.”
“We are now being told, for the second time in two years, that our community will be destroyed and we have no say in the matter,” the coalition wrote recently, in a self-published article titled: “The Battle for Heron Gate Begins.”
“Enough is enough. This is our neighbourhood and we are staying.”
Earlier this year, a month after residents were invited to a “visioning session” with Heron Gate landlord Timbercreek to plan the future of their community, 105 households learned that vision did not include the homes they were living in.
Timbercreek announced in May that it intends to demolish 150 townhouses along three streets in its 16-hectare, 1,665 unit rental complex. In so doing it’s displacing hundreds of residents, many of whom are new immigrants and low-income earners, paying affordable rents for three- and four-bedroom units to house families twice that size.
Heron Gate is far from perfect, its tenants say — take a walk around the blocks slated for eviction and its dilapidation is evident — but for many of those tenants, it’s a home they’ve created, and won’t be able to replicate elsewhere.
Facing a rental market so unfriendly that they literally cannot find anywhere to move to, and because this is the second round of evictions at Heron Gate in recent years, they’re taking a stand.
On September 30, the date by which tenants must move out, as per Timbercreek’s request, they don’t plan on being anywhere else but in their homes, come what may.
The landlord has yet to announce what it plans to build out of the rubble of the 150 homes slated for demolition. But the homes are at the end of their life cycles, Timbercreek said, and 45 units are already vacant.
In 2016, 53 Heron Gate households relocated to make room for new low-rise apartments that are currently under construction on the site. Critics have condemned the neighbourhood’s evolution as gentrification, in which low-income residents are pushed out to make room for renters with the appetite and capacity to pay for high-end units.
“It became apparent to me that a master plan for the entire property was essential before any further development should occur at Heron Gate,” said Alta Vista Coun. Jean Cloutier before a community meeting held in January. “Timbercreek agreed, and is therefore initiating a developer-led secondary plan process to develop a long-term vision for the future of Heron Gate.”
While Timbercreek can’t build up in the neighbourhood until the secondary plan is solidified, it can, however, tear down.
“Timbercreek’s vision has always been for Heron Gate to be a diverse and sustainable community. A project of this magnitude, however, requires that tenants relocate during the revitalization process,” Timbercreek said in an emailed statement.
Leilani Farha, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, characterized Timbercreek’s actions very differently in a recently published Huffington Post opinion piece.
“Their focus does not seem to be on the well-being of their tenants and diversity of the cities where they hold assets. Instead, they practice in unscrupulous demographic engineering in search of profits: replacing poor and vulnerable people with those who possess greater purchasing power.”
Legally, it doesn’t appear Timbercreek has done anything wrong. It’s provided residents the requisite 120 days notice and compensation in the form of three months rent. It’s also voluntarily providing $2,000 in moving compensation, relocation assistance and negotiated discounts with Ottawa moving companies.
Some tenants have already leveraged the resources at their disposal and vacated their homes — a walk through the blocks of houses slated for demolition reveals recently emptied units, with furniture, mail, and the detritus of daily living left behind.
Last week, Timbercreek said 70 per cent of the households facing eviction have found new places to rent, and some have been able to buy homes. Of those households that chose to remain in Ottawa, more than 75 per cent have found homes within five kilometres of Heron Gate, Timbercreek said.
However, that still leaves a significant minority of remaining tenants with little more than six weeks to find a new home.
The Heron Gate Tenant Coalition has advised its members that they are not legally required to move out before Sept. 30. Timbercreek would have to apply to the provincial Landlord and Tenant Board to obtain an official eviction order. The coalition has retained Ottawa lawyer Daniel Tucker-Simmons to represent many of its tenants in the case of an LTB hearing.
“Many of them are really committed to fighting this out, and for very good reasons, but most of them are driven to fight out of necessity,” Tucker-Simmons explained in an interview. Try as they might, many Heron Gate residents facing eviction just can’t find another place to live.
“The people they told me ‘move,’ and I don’t know where I can move to,” said Mohamed Iman, a Somali immigrant and father of seven.
He was on his way into a coalition meeting, where tenants got together to talk about the evictions. Iman said he accepts Timbercreek’s decision to demolish his home, but he can’t move out until he finds a new one.
“The property is for them, and I know that. But what can I do?”
As his family’s sole breadwinner, making $2,200 a month working nights as a cleaner at the University of Ottawa, the housing search has proven immensely challenging.
Many of Iman’s neighbours have stories that sound a lot like his.
According to the Ottawa Neighbourhood Study, 57 per cent of the households in Ledbury-Heron Gate-Ridgemont are making under $50,000 in before-tax income, compared to a city-wide average of 29 per cent. Forty-four per cent are immigrants, and 60 per cent belong to a visible minority.
In letters sent last Friday to Timbercreek’s legal counsel and Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson, Tucker-Simmons laid out his argument that the tenants facing eviction from Heron Gate are experiencing “housing discrimination” in their search for a new home, on the basis of their skin tone and ethnic background.
“They’re going to be the last ones on a landlord’s list to be able to rent,” he explained in an interview, and that discrimination is exacerbated by low vacancy rates. In Ottawa, the vacancy rate for townhouses was 1.6 per cent when the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation published its last rental market report in the fall of 2017.
In his letters, Tucker-Simmons requested accommodation for the tenants under the Human Rights Code of Ontario — either preservation or reparation of the residential complex, additional support securing comparable housing in the area without dispersing community members throughout the city, or first right-of-refusal on similarly priced units in the redeveloped Heron Gate complex.
“A real intentional community has developed here,” he explained. “The objective is really to preserve the community in one way or another.”
Timbercreek has said “all residents impacted by the relocation process at Heron Gate will be offered the right-to-return to a home at Heron Gate when the redevelopment of the community is complete,” but didn’t specify what that right-to-return would entail, exactly.
Abdullahi Ali has lived in Heron Gate for more than 20 years. “We help each other, we get together, we share every problem, every important occasion,” he said. Other residents spoke of babysitting one another’s children, carpools and translating for non-English speaking neighbours.
Ali was forced to move from one Heron Gate unit to his current one during the first round of evictions in 2016. Now, he’s looking outside the community and he’s having no luck finding another four-bedroom unit for his family of nine for anything close to the $1,600 a month he’s currently paying.
“Really what it comes down to is this is a real battlefront in the fight against gentrification and the fight for affordable housing in Ottawa,” said Tucker-Simmons.
But not everyone sees it that way.
A tenant for seven years, Benjamin Ford took issue with the narrative that Timbercreek is doing anything wrong.
“The reality is these are very old buildings, they’re hazards … and they were poorly maintained — that’s the key — by the previous (owner),” he said during an interview, sitting on his front porch and pointing out various problems with his home.
“I have no doubt that Timbercreek looked upon this place with the intention of doing what they’re doing — you don’t buy a dump like this without the intention of updating and flipping … I don’t have a problem with that.”
The Fords are among the lucky ones. They were able to find a new apartment in Ottawa within a week of looking. While they, like many other households facing eviction, have a large family — five children — they don’t belong to a visible minority, and possess perfect English skills.
“Everybody has sympathy, particularly for new Canadians, who need affordable rental accommodation,” said Michael Brooks, the CEO of REALPAC, a national industry association representing owners and managers of investment real estate.
“But whose obligation is it to provide affordable rental?
“This may sound crass, but this is private property. The occupants are there under a rental contract, exchanging accommodation for rent. Sometimes people confuse what should be a public responsibility with private responsibility.”
But where do you go when a social housing placement is years away?
For Margaret Alluker, Heron Gate was there when the public system wasn’t.
Alluker moved to the neighbourhood in 2012, around the same time she got on the city’s wait-list for social housing. Six years later, she’s still on the wait-list, and still living with her four children in Heron Gate. There are approximately 10,000 households waiting for a social housing placement, according to the city.
Alluker’s time in Heron Gate hasn’t been perfect. She’s battled cockroaches and mice, and as the secretary for advocacy group ACORN’s south Ottawa chapter, she participated in a July march to the Timbercreek office, where they delivered work orders to highlight what ACORN described in a press release as “eviction by neglect.”
“Timbercreek has purposely let these units deteriorate so they can push out poor people and rebuild luxury rentals,” the organization wrote.
In the statement it provided to this newspaper, Timbercreek disputed this allegation.
“Since acquiring the properties in 2012/2013, Timbercreek has invested $45 million into Heron Gate. Timbercreek continues to maintain Heron Gate units and quickly responds to repair requests made by residents.”
It’s not as if the company acquired the units in perfect condition. Former Heron Gate resident and Ottawa South MPP John Fraser remembered it as a “model community” when it was first built and managed by Minto back in the 1960s.
But maintenance degraded after TransGlobe acquired the property in 2007, and by the time Timbercreek took over in 2013, there were 500 outstanding work orders from the City of Ottawa.
”The current landlord is better at getting to those repairs,” Fraser said, though he also acknowledged that’s a relative commendation, and his office has fielded calls from dissatisfied tenants about Timbercreek’s property management.
In the battle for Heron Gate, the MPP is working from the sidelines. Rather than fighting the evictions, he’s chosen to support tenants in their search for new accommodations.
“The community is full of families, and they need help.”
Parliamentary secretary to the minister of families, children and social development Adam Vaughan said the Heron Gate eviction is too far along to halt, but makes a good case study for “the economic displacement of low-income rental communities,” an issue not isolated to Ottawa.
“It’s unfortunate we have to learn from them, but it’s important that we do.”
But among the 105 households served with eviction notices, there remain holdouts who aren’t waving the white flag just yet.
Some tenants have vowed not to move on principle. But others, including those with “I am not moving” signs in their windows, said in interviews that given the time to find an adequate place, they would. And that’s what they’d like from Timbercreek.
But unless the company changes course — and the question of whether it’s considering doing so was not directly addressed when posed by this newspaper — the Sept. 30 deadline marches ever closer.
“Rental supply is at its peak in the summer but finding a range of options becomes more challenging toward the fall, so now is the time for residents to meet with Timbercreek’s team, view listings and secure a lease,” the company said.
The City of Ottawa will not provide a demolition permit until all services to the homes have been shut off, and no residents remain.
Alluker said she’s given up on looking for a new house before the end of next month, and she’s hoping that Timbercreek offers tenants more time to relocate.
“For me, the issue that we’re fighting for is not a one-single-person issue. It’s not my issue. It might be my neighbour can find a place but for me, unity together is a good thing to make sure that next time, something like will not happen.
“My daughter was crying like, ‘Oh I can’t move from here, my friends, I’m going to miss them, my teacher, my school.’ I was like ‘okay, we have to wait.’ I don’t know what will happen, but let us wait.”
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