Tenant Unions in Surrey Fight for Healthy Homes
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- Category: Surrey Healthy Homes
- Published on 12 January 2012
Surrey ACORN's Healthy Homes campaign took an exciting step in December to round out a successful year. At a meeting at the Guildford Public Library, members officially voted to begin the creation of Tenants Unions for Healthy Homes in buildings across Surrey. Formed out of a desire for formal representation as a means to winning improved housing for tenants across the city, these tenants unions will be a show of solidarity for all people willing to stand up for their legal and human rights.
Quick off of the heals of the meeting, the first four tenants unions led by ACORN Canada's leadership in Bon Tera Apartments, Kwantlen Park Manor, Imperial Parkside Apartments, and Parkside Apartments on 105A Ave began the process of securing formal recognition from landlords as the voice of tenants in their buildings.
In a short time some of those tenants unions have had meetings with landlords, quickly securing much needed investments. As expected, some landlords would claim that there are no problems with the buildings and use bully tactics to intimidate ACORN Canada members from forming a union, but members are not planning on stepping down from this fight.
Healthy Homes for Surrey Families
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- Category: Surrey Healthy Homes
- Published on 20 October 2011
Whalley ACORN leader Susan Collard led an energized press conference in front of her Surrey Apartment building last month, to detail the battle she has waged her against landlords. Members were joined at the press conference by local MLA Bruce Ralston and BC NDP housing critic Shane Simpson.
Surrey Families Need Healthy Homes
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- Category: Surrey Healthy Homes
- Published on 28 September 2011
Surrey ACORN is continuing to campaign for a standards and maintenance bylaw to ensure families have healthy homes. Members living in a low rise apartment complex - owned by infamous slumlords the Sahota family - used their own situation to highlight the need for immediate action from the City. This action has helped raise the profile of the issue, and brought increased media attention to the plight of tenants in Canada’s fastest growing city.In October ACORN members will be making presentations and providing research to the Surrey Social Planning Committee on the need for new municipal tenant protections and on strategies the City could undertake to ensure Healthy Homes for all.
24 Hours Vancouver: Surrey residents fed up with building conditions
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- Category: Surrey Healthy Homes
- Published on 08 September 2011
Sue Collard said she’s an “old coot” that just wants to live without the constant smell of mould, the itching of fleas and the streams of water flooding into her apartment’s suites.
She’s lived in the “rot” of Kwantlen Park Manor at 12975 106 Ave. in Surrey for the past six years, and said it’s time the government made the landlords – the same owners of DTES’s run-down Balmoral, Cobalt, Regent and Astoria hotels – do something.
“There are persistent leaks in this building,” Collard said. “My next-door neighbour puts two-litre margarine tubs on the floor.”
In the last two years, she’s taken the complaint up with the provincial Residential Tenancy Branch in hope of penalizing her landlords, but with few results. Instead, Surrey Coun. Judy Villeneuve is scheduled to meet with the tenants Wednesday to see if the city has any jurisdiction to help.
Vancouver Sun: Tenants in leaky Surrey building want city, province to take action against landlord
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- Category: Surrey Healthy Homes
- Published on 08 September 2011
METRO VANCOUVER — Residents are complaining about the lack of repairs in a Surrey building owned by notorious Vancouver landlord Gurdyal Singh Sahota.
Last year, a B.C. Supreme Court judge upheld the Residential Tenancy Branch decision against Sahota to pay 36 tenants a total of $170,000 to compensate them after they were forced to vacate an apartment building at 2131 Pandora St. after heavy rains caused flooding in suites in mid-October 2007. City inspectors had deemed the building "unsafe to occupy" after the roof collapsed. The B.C. Residential Tenancy Branch found the landlord Sahota showed a "reckless disregard" for tenants.
Now a group of residents has complained that another building owned by Sahota's family company, Waterford Developments, has had a leaky roof for more than six years and hasn't been fixed.
The Province: Decaying Surrey suites cause outrage among neighbours
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- Category: Surrey Healthy Homes
- Published on 08 September 2011
Sue Collard is fed up with living in a flood zone.
The 54-year-old Surrey resident has watched rain leak from her living room ceiling each winter for the six years she’s called the Kwantlen Park Manor home. So have at least five of her neighbours in the poorly-maintained complex owned by Vancouver’s Sahota family.
“It’s just an ordinary building with ordinary people who go out and work, some single parents and retired people. It’s not the type of building you would immediately associate with slumlords,” said Collard, a retail employee who lives in suite 201 with her partner and her 19-year-old son. “But you never know what a building is like until you live there.”
Inside her building the carpets are dirty, the lighting dim. The low ceiling of her living room features huge water-damage repair patches. Electrical fixtures are exposed. Wood balconies are rotting. Collard claims there was a mushroom growing out of the hall carpet.
