Karen Crane’s upper floor apartment is perfectly furnished with an impressive view, but its living room looks like a construction site.
The Crane sofas are covered with fall cloths and the floor tables have thrown themselves throughout the living room, revealing the concrete slab. Under its patio door, a strip of plaster panels has been removed, exposing concrete, metal fragments and outstanding nails.
She says that the unit has been in this condition for months, and the problems have been resorting for years.
“I am an educated person … I am a woman who has some resistance,” said Crane, 62, in an interview. “But I am broken down here, you know, I’m vanishing.”
Crane, a registered nurse, said shortly after she moved to her apartment at Walter Havill Drive in the Halifax Armedale neighborhood in the fall of 2015, began to notice that the heat did not work and, sometimes, the floor near the door of the patio was wet.
Then they arrived full -fledged floods that covered the floor of the living room on multiple occasions.
Almost a decade later, the problem of floods has not been solved, he said, despite an order in his favor of the residential holdings of the province, and an order of an official of municipal buildings so that repairs are completed at the end of April.
Crane said he feels that government systems are not working.
“I don’t think it’s destined to be so, but there seems to be holes that need to be tight,” he said.
Nora Macintosh, lawyer for the personnel of New Legal Scotland AID in Halifax, says that her office listens to the “very regularly” tenants who fight to complete the repairs in their rentals.
“The frustrating part is that many times the advice we can give does not feel very good, because there are not many options that people can access to complete repairs,” Macintosh told CBC News in an interview.
Macintosh expressed concerns that have been in the hands of tenants and owners that the residential lease system lacks application capabilities.
Meanwhile, the Head of the Residential Holidays Program insists that there is a way to enforce repairs, it may not be well known.
Exhausting all options
Crane said that over the years, his lessor, Christmas Knowledge of United Gulf Developments Ltd., sent different people to evaluate floods and heat problems and try to solve them, but nothing worked for a long time.
She said that dealing with family health problems and working through the Covid-19 pandemic when a nurse caught all her attention and the years passed.
“My question for anyone who stayed in an apartment that was not being repaired for eight years, six years, 10 years, is why you didn’t leave,” he said.
Crane said she stayed because she loved her apartment, her rent was affordable for her and believed that the problem would be solved.
Finally, in 2024, he resorted to the residential holdings of the province that regulates disputes between tenants and owners through hearings, then issues decisions called orders of the director.
Crane did not ask for money, he only repairs. The Tenure Officer ruled in his favor in September 2024.
By December 2024, the heat problem was solved, but floods no. Crane called the municipal services of Halifax and a residential building official visited his apartment. He ordered that repairs be completed before April 30, 2025.
“He said: ‘This is terrible, this will be repaired in a month.’ I said: ‘Are you sure?’ “Crane said.
Since the deadline of April passed, Crane said he contacted the building official several times, but he has not returned.
He said that after CBC News visited his building for an interview and contacted all the parties involved, the municipal building official and the maintenance supervisor of their owner contacted her to address the repairs.
Crane said the inspector gave the owner an extension until August, and Crane has another residential hearing reserved for July 16.
The regional municipality of Halifax rejected a CBC News request to interview a representative of the construction standards department.
“The staff cannot talk about the details of any individual case, but I can tell him that construction officials use” violation notice, “said spokeswoman Sarah Brannen in an email. “These notices say that the owner is completely informed of deficiencies and establishes a reasonable timeline to complete the work.”
Brannen said that the next step is an “order to fulfill”, then, if the work is not yet completed at the end of the time frame, the final option is “the municipality that completes the work under a remedy process or referred the matter to the courts.”
The provincial official recommends files files for rent reduction
Melissa Mosher, director of residential holdings, said she could not address the specific case of Crane for privacy reasons, but for “anyone who fights for repairs, must be difficult for them, frustrating, I imagine that not someone wants to live.”
The recommended tenants Mosher in this situation request a rental reduction or a reduction in the rent, until repairs are carried out.
She said that without an orderly income reduction, “it could be a bit more difficult” for a tenant to enforce repairs. For this reason, he said that his department is working to change the forms used to request a hearing to be clearer than requesting a rental reduction is an option.
“It is certainly something that … I want them to use me more frequently because I think it is a much more effective way,” said Mosher. “It’s something I would like to work on to try to improve with my team.”
No response from the owner
Property records show that the Crane building is owned by a numbered company. The Registry of Joint Actions Companies of Nueva Scotia shows that the director and president of the company is Knowledge, who is also president of United Gulf Developments Inc., a company that owns and develops residential and commercial properties in the Halifax area.
CBC News tried to contact you through your company and through the Property Administrator in the Crane building, but did not receive a deadline response.
Macintosh, the lawyer, said he does not represent Crane in this case, but has previously represented an tenant in the Crane building that had a similar flood problem and also fought to enforce repairs.
