Upgrading TCHC fire safety would take ‘millions’.

After a fatal fire that left three dead, the Star asked CEO Greg Spearn to explain why some seniors’ buildings aren’t subject to higher standards.

Thestar.com
Feb. 9, 2016
By Jennifer Pagliaro

After the death of three residents at a seniors-only public housing building in Scarborough on Friday, fire officials say a legal loophole means many of the city’s most vulnerable residents don’t get the same safety protections as those in licensed care homes.

Toronto Community Housing’s senior-only buildings - housing nearly 28,000 residents - aren’t covered by higher fire and safety standards recently implemented by the province for care homes, such as additional automatic sprinklers, deputy fire chief Jim Jessop earlier told the Star.

Because of how those regulations are interpreted, neither are some other non-profit buildings overseen by the city that provide housing to thousands of low-income seniors, though it’s not clear how many.

Mayor John Tory said Monday it makes sense to wait for the results of an investigation of the fire at Neilson Hall Apartments. But he said the city should be making sure buildings are “as safe as they can be” for seniors.

So what’s being done to protect the city’s at-risk and aging population from unequal standards? The Star sat down with TCHC’s interim president and CEO Greg Spearn to talk about the issue.

Three people lost their lives Friday. There are other residents who survived that fire, their families, and other seniors who live in buildings across TCH’s portfolio, who are wondering what the expectation is today for care and safety in these buildings.

We’re devastated at the loss - of course, not as much as the immediate families are - but it is a horrible thing to have happen, and we regret it. Having said that, we rent apartments to people, and the apartments are no different than other apartments across the city. Everything that we built was built to code at the time, it’s compliant, and we do a series of regular safety audits ourselves. I’m satisfied that the team has done exactly that in this case.

There are new fire regulations that consider “vulnerable” occupancies. There’s an increased level of fire safety in those instances that don’t apply to TCHC buildings and some other buildings operated by non-profit housing providers. Is there a reason why you couldn’t meet that standard?

We will make our buildings compliant with any regulation we’re given and do so diligently. Is there a reason that we would not do them now? It really in many respects does come down to funding. The cost of a retrofit for adding sprinklers to the building is extraordinarily high, and that’s up against demands for repairs to our buildings that we think are a very high priority for us as well, because we are literally faced with closing 10 to 12 per cent of our housing stock if we don’t fix them. So, our focus right now is on fixing the buildings to retain the housing stock, but at the same time being very diligent about fire safety and systems.

When you talk about the cost issue, there was a request for additional money TCHC did not have, to implement some further safety and other measures. Are we talking millions of dollars to retrofit some of these buildings?

We are. It is literally millions and millions of dollars to do it. It’s a very expensive proposition. Again, we have roughly 69 seniors buildings in the portfolio. (That means people 59 and older.) Remembering that these are apartments, the same as any other private landlord in the city of Toronto, it’s kind of a question of: Why pick one particular grouping over another? If there’s a standard of apartments in the city that we as a society feel should have upgraded sprinklers, then I think that’s where the focus should be.

You are just a landlord, but you do have these vulnerable populations. Is there a challenge to take care of them adequately?

Sure, there is a challenge at times and we do our best to connect people to the services that we think they need or ought to consider. Remember that we’re not like a private landowner, in the sense that we don’t get to screen our tenants. We are not permitted to do that. A name comes up, we are given a name, they move in and we don’t know what their vulnerabilities are, if any. And we are just, as a landlord, left to manage the vulnerability if it exists.

A task force presented some recommendations that had to do with clutter and hoarding issues in TCHC buildings. Was that a factor in this case?

It is an issue in parts of the portfolio, where we do have clutter issues with some of our tenants. In the case of this particular building, no, it was not an issue.

The mayor said he wants to ensure TCH is fully held to the standards currently in place, but he said he’d like the city to do better. For you, what does that mean?

Well, we’ve recently - independent of this fire matter happening - we’ve stepped up our fire safety patrols in the building. One of the challenges we’ve been having for some time is exit and entry doors to the buildings. We repair 4,000 doors a month, and what we find is we’ll repair a door one day and two days later it’s broken again, because the bad guys want to continue to have access to the building. So that’s a continuing challenge to confront. We’ve implemented a program whereby every building is walked every day, and we’ve talked to our union partners about that for their staff who work in our buildings. We have their 100 per cent support.

When did that happen?

That started about three weeks ago.

There was another fire recently at 200 Wellesley and there have obviously been other fatal fires in the past. Do you feel TCHC is doing enough?

I mean, I think anyone should always feel they can do better and should always be looking back to say: Could I have done that just that much better? Yes we’ve had a few in-unit fires recently and each of those was related to the particular occupant and their behaviour patterns, which we can’t control - and neither could any landlord control that. So we’re left in a bit of a reactive position. If it doesn’t relate to vulnerabilities - I think in one case it probably did - in other cases it was simply people just living their lives and either making mistakes or having behaviour you wouldn’t think they would have, but they did. We do the best we can with the resources we’ve got, and we’re keeping our team focused and diligent on safety at all times.