By Mike Rifkin
The City of Ottawa doesn’t have enough social workers to handle all of its social housing units and security in the buildings is inadequate, says Somerset Ward Coun. Diane Holmes.
Workers employed by the Ottawa Community Housing Corporation don’t have enough time or resources to deal with all of the problems they face in helping housing tenants, she says.
“They have far too many buildings to take care of, too many tenants on their roster. They have very little time to deal with a lot of problems,” says Holmes.
OCHC runs 14,000 social housing units around the city. Social workers provide counselling and assistance to the units’ tenants.
“They provide counselling. They link tenants up with all the services they need,” Holmes says.
“They support the tenants who need small amounts of support. They may have had financial problems. They would help them work on a repayment plan.”
In addition to city-employed workers, OCHC hires social workers from private housing organizations including Ottawa Salus Corporation and Options Bytown. Options Bytown is a non-profit housing organization that also runs its own housing units. It has nine staff members that serve 15 OCHC buildings.
According to Options Bytown, OCHC social workers work with a much larger number of tenants than private social workers do.
Each of their staff members is usually responsible for about 200 clients. OCHC workers, however, are often responsible for up to 1,500 clients.
Holmes says social workers are needed to help some tenants stay on their medication, provide financial counselling to pay bills and avoid eviction and deal with mental health problems.
She says OCHC is looking for money to hire more social workers and expects a report in the next few months.
But Holmes adds the biggest problem the OCHC faces, other than a shortage of social workers, is security in the buildings. Security is handled by private companies hired by the city. But she says the current setup has not made the buildings as safe as they should be. Tenants in some social housing units have complained of violence and drug dealing.
“Ottawa Community Housing is looking at how we can provide more security in the building than we do now,” says Holmes. “Hiring the security companies has not provided the level of security that we need.”
She says part of the solution is figuring out how to provide proper security, hiring more staff members as well as evicting tenants who cause violence.
“We’re working hard to get rid of our problem tenants,” she says. “There are only a small number of tenants who are significant problem. We certainly have to get rid of drug sellers, for example.”
The issue is not simple and no single group is to blame for the problems faced by social housing tenants, says Options Bytown executive director Lorraine Bentley.
“It’s very easy to blame some people, but everybody has issues,” she says. “There’s no demographic that fits ‘troublemaker.’ ”
Holmes says she is confident the problems will be worked out.
“It’s taken many years to get to this state,” she says. “All the problems can’t be solved over- night, but we’re certainly working hard on the solution.”