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You
hear the stories every so often in any major city -- some nightmare
apartment building filled with cockroaches, broken windows and crumbling
floors. Tenants complain. Nothing gets fixed.
No big surprise. But just how prevalent, we wondered, is substandard
rental housing in a city where it's hard to find a place -- any
place -- for less than $1,000 a month?
To get a thorough answer to that question, we knew we needed to
get beyond the anecdotes. We needed a comprehensive view of the
problem. And that needed data.
The Toronto Star's series Broken Homes is based on City of Toronto
apartment building inspection records, never before obtained, that
revealed the extent to which Canada's largest city allows low-income
families to live in squalid conditions.
Getting at the story wasn't easy.
It took a six-month battle under access-to-information legislation
to finally get a copy of city records inspection data for a two-and-a-half
year period. And that victory proved to be only the first in a number
of tall hurdles.
First of all, we began to smell a problem with the data. Buildings
that I and my reporting partner Michelle Shephard had visited and
found to have serious, ongoing problems showed up with spotless
records in the city records we had.
The picture painted by the data was frequently inconsistent with
the picture we were seeing in the real world. We started to doubt
the records. And if the data aren't credible, there's no way the
story could be. So we went back to the city with concerns about
the reliability of the records we'd obtained from them.
Sure enough, city staff eventually confirmed the data was missing
thousands of records -- the result of an error by the person who
ran the data. A second version was eventually obtained with all
inspection records. But that bureaucratic error, if missed, would
have undermined the entire series.
We would have incorrectly identified landlords and their buildings
as being among the worst in the city when they weren't even close.
It was a clear lesson in the potential pitfalls of computer-assisted
reporting and how important it is to put government records to a
strict and vigorous smell test.
In this case, that meant marrying data analysis with on-the-ground
reporting. Despite the delays and near catastrophes, acquiring solid
data on apartment building inspections in Toronto turned out to
be well worth the trouble.
It provided a detailed portrait of deplorable living conditions
for thousands of Toronto tenants on the lower end of the rental
market. It also revealed how the city's inspection system fails
to hold landlords accountable or enforce minimum standards for so
basic a need as housing. Beyond individual buildings with dozens,
sometimes hundreds of documented problems, the data also showed
an interesting geographical trend in the city -- low-income neighbourhoods
showed a disproportionate number of problem buildings.
After analyzing the data, we filed another round of access-to-information
requests to get paper copies of city orders and notices against
buildings that topped the list in terms of city work orders. These
provided further detail on infractions, including inspectors' hand-written
notes. Then, we hit the streets again, interviewing tenants in their
homes in order to bring readers inside some of the city's worst
apartment buildings where families live with collapsed ceilings,
cockroach and mice infestations, mould-covered walls and broken
locks.
Predictably, the vast majority of tenants interviewed were reluctant
to speak on-the-record for fear of losing their homes to landlords
who might retaliate. Getting names, faces and stories of tenants
required repeated visits and calls to gain their trust.
We then took the stories of deteriorating conditions to landlords,
housing experts and city and provincial officials in order to put
the statistics in context.
The series quickly captured the attention of both the public and
politicians. It triggered strong public reaction in support of a
more aggressive and open inspection system in Toronto. A public
opinion poll commissioned by The Star found more than 80 percent
of respondents wanted the city to make inspection records easily
available to the public.
City staff released a report in December, only a month after the
series was published, recommending a new disclosure system for apartment
buildings, including posting inspection results in building lobbies,
a telephone hotline for tenant complaints and the licensing of apartment
buildings. The recommendations, which mirror those made in the series,
also include introducing mandatory inspections of all apartment
buildings to replace the current complaints-driven system.
The series, which continues to report new findings on the state
of low-income tenancy in Toronto, has triggered a meaningful and
important public debate on a fundamental issue in Toronto and across
the country -- the right to adequate housing.
Thanks to that public debate, significant public policy change is
already in the works.
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