Former ‘worst landlord’ ends up in city’s good books with program to revamp underused amenities spaces

Thestar.com
Feb. 7, 2019
Donovan Vincent

Deko Farah sits in front of a sewing machine as instructor Floretta Brown teaches her how to hem and stitch a tablecloth.

Farah, 37, a mother of three, and nearly 100 other individuals started coming last year to the free sewing classes at the Community Place Hub, a large space that was once a swimming pool for residents of two apartment towers on Weston Rd. near Lawrence Ave. W.

“I came here because I wanted to learn to sew,” Farah says, while at the centre in late January.

“Now I can sew a dress, a scarf,” she says, adding she has made new friends in the sewing group and enjoys eating lunch with them.

Two decades ago the owner of the property, Vincenzo Barrasso was public enemy number one as far as city of Toronto inspectors were concerned.

From 1997 to 2003, he was charged by Toronto building inspectors nearly 20 times for infractions related to poor building maintenance. He owns three late 1970s-era highrise properties in Toronto -- the two towers at the Weston Rd. location, an apartment building on Lansdowne Ave. and Dupont St., and two highrise towers on Kipling Ave.

As a landlord, Barrasso seems to have turned over a new leaf -- with some government help.

Now the city of Toronto is running community programming for tenants and local residents in a portion of the 6,500 square feet of amenity space at his Weston Rd. property.

The sewing hub is part of a broad program the city recently launched in some privately owned buildings across the city as well as Toronto Community Housing properties. The goal is to move into unused amenity spaces in aging buildings and provide programs, delivered by community agencies, that benefit residents and others who live nearby.

At Barrasso’s Kipling towers, there’s a food preservation hub for residents that features canning and jarring of surplus produce and a sewing hub like the one at his Weston Rd. property.

The Weston Rd. hub has won him supporters.

“It’s too good to be true. This (space) is very, very good for us and the community,” says Criss Habal-Brosek, executive director for Progress Place, a non-profit that provides a variety of services including mental health support, job training, recreational activities and help finding housing.

The service agency runs the sewing hub for the city of Toronto, and Progress Place is part of a network of 16 agencies that provide programming in the hub, which opened in April 2015.

The city of Toronto’s sewing sessions at Weston Rd., which began this past spring, give participants an opportunity to be among peers and helps avoid feelings of isolation, especially for the women in the program who weren’t getting out of their homes, says Kaltuma Haji, a Progress Place employee and co-ordinator of the hub.

Habal-Brosek said that before the agencies moved into that space they read the stories about Barrasso’s background. In a 2006 article, Now Magazine called Barrasso one of the city’s “worst landlords.”

And in the late 1990s and early 2000s his building on Lansdowne, known as “Crack Tower,” was the subject of several media accounts.

“We read stories when we looked into becoming involved (with Barrasso). We talked about (his past) ... whatever happened in the past happened, but we’ve never experienced anything like that,” Habal-Brosek says.

In a brief phone call to the Star from Montreal Friday, Barrasso says he “works hard and I invest a lot of money in my buildings, what can I say.”

He later added: “I care about my staff, I care about my tenants.”

In a 2012 Star story, he said that everyone knows he had problems in the past.

“Maybe at the time people can say I’m a bad person. I’m not a bad person. I had a lot of bad news (in the media). A lot of things happen, a lot of problems with the city. I lost control,” he said at the time.

Aside from more than a dozen charges he faced in the 1990s and 2000s for failing to keep his building in a good state of repair, the Star reported in 2012 that at one point in 2003 he had 100 outstanding orders and notices against his three properties. The Weston Rd. property had nearly 160 notices or orders in 2005.

But in 2011, he received $5 million in federal money for renovations to his buildings, under a city-run program supporting residential rehabilitation.

It was a turnaround period for him.

Around this time Barrasso and his property management team began co-operating with the city of Toronto through the latter’s Tower Renewal program, aimed at improving Toronto’s aging highrises.

Through the program Barrasso has used city-funded support to replace roof and elevators, refresh lobbies in his properties, install community gardens and other projects, says Michael Skaljin, project manager for the city’s Tower and Neighbourhood Revitalization Unit.

Currently, according to information from Toronto’s Municipal Licensing and Standards Division, there are no open/active orders that have been issued to the Weston Rd. property, none for the Lansdowne Ave. address, and at the Kipling Ave towers there’s only a minor deficiency in a suite, a notice that was issued Jan. 11.

Roslyn Brown, vice-president for Barrasso’s company, says her boss used his own money to cover an underused pool that now serves as the Weston Rd. hub. A mixture of sand and other substances was used to fill the indoor pool, over which a large carpet now sits.

Other fixes in the building included installing a heating system, new cabinets, appliances and computers. A kitchen was also fixed up, Brown said.

The pool wasn’t very popular with the local community when it was open -- it was closed for good around 2006 -- but the computers now in the hub have been a major draw for children and adults, many of whom live in the Weston Rd. towers, which stand at 25 storeys each and hold a total of 490 units, Brown says.

Aside from the sewing hubs, the city of Toronto’s program includes five bike hubs across the city where young people are taught to repair abandoned bicycles including one in a Toronto Community Housing building near Jane and Finch.

There’s also a share and reuse pilot program in St. James Town, where participants can learn how to fix items such as furniture, electronics and kitchen appliances. (These latter two programs do not operate in Barrasso’s buildings).

About 17 people have landed well-paying jobs in the city’s program. A total of $7 million from Toronto’s Solid Waste Management division has been put toward the first three years of the initiative because so much of the program is devoted to reusing items and diverting them from landfill -- such as the repairing of abandoned bikes, and the sewing hub -- where customers come in, leave clothes that need repairs and class members fix the items as part of the training.

The clothes are repaired free of charge to the customer.

“Part of our work is rescuing these spaces. Because what happened in many of these buildings is over the years throughout the ’70s and ’80s, building owners closed up these (amenity) spaces,” Skaljin says.

Progress Place’s Habal-Brosek says she’s thankful that Barrasso agreed to create the hub space at Weston Rd. The sewing initiative and the other programs have helped knit the community closer together, she says.

She’s never met Barrasso, but says if she ever does she’ll tell him, “thanks so much for all your support.”