Stan Brodzinski's home is his castle. Unfortunately, he shares it with a number of unwanted guests - cockroaches that infest his publicly owned apartment building. They're in his cupboards, on the walls, on his counters, inside his TV set, even crawling into his cup of coffee.

Legally blind, and sharing his apartment with his seeing-eye dog Dolly, Brodzinski lives on a fixed pension of about $900/month. The only place he can afford is an apartment in subsidized housing run by the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC), an agency set up by the City of Toronto to provide a home to some of the city's most vulnerable people.

"Toronto Housing Authority doesn't care about any of their tenants," charges Brodzinski. In the 11 years he has lived in a TCHC apartment, he has made numerous complaints but says they fall on deaf ears. "Many times I've asked them to do maintenance work, but unless you go through the bureaucratic regulations you don't get anything. And it's obvious to even a blind person that they ignore people."

Brodzinski is one of 160,000 tenants who live in subsidized housing managed by TCHC. With 60,000 apartments, townhouses and houses, the Corporation is the largest provider of social housing in Canada. Many of the buildings are run down and in dire need of repair. During a review of properties across the city, W-FIVE found leaky roofs, crumbling walls and apartments filled with bedbugs and cockroaches.

Across town from Stan Brodzinski, Lillian Carrigan lives in a bedbug-infested TCHC building. A 72-year-old grandmother, she spends her days documenting the disrepair in her building. She provided W-FIVE with pictures she sent to TCHC of mould on the floors and ceilings and garbage blocking the exits to the building.

Twenty five per cent of tenants in Toronto Community Housing buildings are pensioners like Carrigan, people living on a fixed income who worry about the condition of their homes. Despite her best efforts to keep bedbugs from entering her tidy home, Carrigan has been bitten. "I was sitting there a short time ago when something bit me. And I jumped up, because I knew there was bedbugs in the building. And I had three good-sized welts on my upper thigh."

Class action

With tenants living in conditions like these, Toronto lawyer Sarah Shartal has started a class-action suit asking the Court to order TCHC to make repairs and bring the buildings up to Code within six months.

According to Shartal, TCHC could do more to find the necessary money. "If you've got six-billion dollars in assets and you've got a credit line of two-hundred-and-fifty million dollars, you could mortgage the assets, take the money and fix the buildings."

The lawsuit also asks that each tenant be awarded damages for negligence and breach of Charter rights on the part of TCHC, for not keeping its properties up to standard. The Statement of Claim also points out that for many tenants, moving is no option because to do so would end rent supplements they receive.

The case is still before the courts and the class action has yet to be certified.

TCHC admits there is a problem with the state of the buildings and acknowledge the repair bill is currently upward of $300 million. But they say they simply don't have the money required to invest in the repair of the buildings.

Derek Ballantyne, the CEO of TCHC, says the problem started in 2001 when the province of Ontario got out of the business of socialized housing and downloaded their stock of 30,000 housing units to the City of Toronto. Overnight, the city doubled the number of low-income housing units it managed and was saddled with a repair bill that was estimated then to be $230 million. Ballantyne says the Corporation has lobbied both the provincial and federal governments for funding needed to make the repairs, but with no success.

Safety concerns

But the shocking state of disrepair of the buildings isn't the only concern that many tenants are forced to live with. There is an even deadlier side. Captured recently by TCHC's own security cameras was graphic footage of an incident that made headlines across the country - a shooting that left an 18-year-old boy dead and five others injured - right on TCHC property. W-FIVE has discovered this is far from an isolated incident. In fact in the past three-and-a-half-years there have been 81 murders that have occurred on or near TCHC property - one-third of the murders in Toronto during that period.

Suzette Cadougan has experienced the violence first hand. As a single mom who's raising her family in Toronto Housing, her worst nightmare came true in August, 2005. Her four-year-old son, Shaquan, was hit by a spray of bullets in front of her townhouse. Now almost eight, he has been left scarred by the incident. Two of the four bullets he was hit with are still inside his body. Frustrated by the lack of security, Cadougan and her family are suing the Corporation for nearly $5 million for negligence, claiming the shutting down of security offices, including the one near her home, in favour of mobile patrols, put her family at risk.

Ballantyne says he'd like to have more money to spend on security, but that isn't an option. "The choices are stark for us. We double the spending on community safety, we reduce the amount of money we have available for maintenance. And frankly, when we're that far behind the eight-ball on maintenance and capital improvements, we can't really afford to reduce much of anything on the maintenance side."

Acknowledging the problems, Ballantyne argues that he's been asked to do the impossible. Until the province of Ontario provides a substantial amount of money for capital repairs, the situation for Toronto Housing tenants isn't going to change much.

The Ontario government recently gave Toronto $36 million to help with repairs but not all of it is earmarked for Toronto Housing, which could use ten times that amount to fix up its properties.

One of the politicians Ballantyne has been lobbying is Jim Watson, Ontario's Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing. "The conditions that these people are living in, many of these people are living in, is not acceptable," says Watson, in an interview with W-FIVE.

But the minister insists the province also needs help to solve the problem. "We need the federal government at the table if we are going to actually make a dent."

So, while the Toronto blames Ontario, and the province blames the federal government, tenants like Stan Brodzinski continue to live in squalor and unsafe conditions. But it's not even his own living conditions that upset him the most.

"I don't feel as bad for myself, I feel terrible for the little kids that have to grow up in this environment." When asked if he thought it was too dangerous, Brodzinski replied: "Yes. So I feel worse for them than I do for me."