Appalling conditions

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While it may have stopped raining for most of today, it did not inside Fatemeh Kubeia’s apartment. The Hamilton mother has been trying to get her landlord to repair her building for months. It’s so bad, the cancer patient has to get up all night long to empty overflowing buckets. Kubeia told us she’s been on the phone daily trying to get someone to fix the problem but nothing was done until we visited with our cameras.

For three days, water has been gushing from Kubeia’s ceiling throughout her two-storey subsidized apartment. So much it looks like the ceiling is about to cave in. Kubeia can’t cope, she’s in the middle of chemo treatments for cancer. “I cannot go to my apportionments when it’s raining and I have to be awake all night to change the bucket. So next day I cannot go, I’m shaking, crying, I don’t know what to do.”

Kubeia says the water has been spreading to new places and getting worse month after month. Her clothes and furniture are getting ruined. One daughter’s bedroom has buckets on the bed and the floor. Across the hall, another single mom, also has containers everywhere to catch the drips. She’s worried about what looks like black mold. There’s a breeze when the windows are closed and ice forms on the inside in winter.

The property manager, DMS, says the building needs a new roof, but it’s a non-profit building with limited funds. But another group was protesting in downtown Hamilton today about living conditions in two other buildings managed by DMS. They say their complaints are met with bullying.

The COO of DMS told us he has reached out to the tenants of 1220 Upper Wentworth to offer them alternate accommodations but Kubeia says this only happened today when they found out our cameras were there. The city says DMS was issued an order to fix the roof by November 25 or the city will do the work and charge the owner through their taxes. As for the other buildings protesters were rallying about, DMS says those complaints don’t reflect the majority of the tenants. The city has no official complaints about those buildings.