Decaying buildings, fetid apartments, towers on the verge of collapse. For many, these are the mental pictures that spring to mind when they hear the words “Toronto Community Housing Corporation.”

Some of the public housing agency’s properties are literally falling apart — earlier this month bricks came cascading off the side of one of its high rises in Scarborough — and Torontonians could be forgiven for thinking TCHC is doing little to keep its buildings in good shape.

But in fact expensive repair work is constant and ongoing. This year alone TCHC is investing $175 million in capital fixes and as of last month, there were 487 projects underway in 313 of its 2,200 properties. This week, the agency led the Star on a tour of three active work sites to provide an up-close look at what’s being done to beat back the rising tide of urgently needed repairs.

The problem-solver

In the epic effort to fix up TCHC properties, Allen Murray is the agency’s Sisyphus — the man constantly trying to push the boulder up the hill, only to watch it roll back down again. As the director of operations for TCHC’s facilities management division, he’s responsible for all major repair work at the corporation.

Before he joined TCHC 16 months ago he worked in the real estate division of a major Canadian bank, and says he was surprised to find maintenance issues at the agency weren’t as dire as he had feared. His biggest frustration is the public perception that the agency is a “heartless landlord.”Despite TCHC’s reputation, “there are people who are doing a good job and care about what’s being done,” he says.

Still, during a visit to the Finch Ardwick housing complex in York West, the scope of the challenge facing the cash-strapped agency was apparent. On Monday two contractors were at work replacing the roofs of 15 of the complex’s 56 townhomes — a job that will repair only a fraction of one TCHC property, but will cost $200,000. A further $500,000 is going toward waterproofing the buildings’ foundations.

Murray, an upbeat 48-year-old, was dressed in a navy Tommy Hilfiger windbreaker and steel-toed boots designed to look like dress shoes. He described how the agency selects which repair jobs get funding in simple terms. “Basically we rank the projects (in terms of how critical they are),” he said, “and then you draw the line where we run out of money.”

At Finch Ardwick, the line has been drawn on the complex’s western edge, where seven townhouses have been boarded up because they’re sliding off their foundations. THCH has no plans to fix them or tear them down, and for three years they’ve been rotting away, steps from the doorways of Ardwick’s occupied buildings.

Finch Ardwick was built in 1967 and Murray estimates it would cost several million dollars to do all the repairs it needs. But he insists that the $700,000 in work currently underway will make a real difference. “I think that has tons of positive benefits for the residents. It shows that we do care about their living conditions.”

At 2743 Victoria Park in Scarborough, there are also multiple projects on the go: $1.7-million is being spent to replace the highrise’s leaking roof and repair its crumbling underground parking garage. On Monday, all of the earth had been scraped off the surface of the garage’s roof, and a crew of three contractors was chipping away at deteriorating portions of the vast concrete expanse. Eight more men were on the tower’s roof, putting finishing its new waterproof membrane.

Murray led the way to the top of the highrise, through a stairwell filled with a damp urine-like smell. As the sound of jackhammers reverberated up from 16 storeys below, Murray was asked if his job feels like trying to bail water out of a rapidly sinking ship.

“No, I wouldn’t say that,” he responded. He sees each completed repair as a victory. “Every project that we do, we’re making things better.”

The tenant

Marina isn’t so sure things are getting better. A senior who has lived at 2743 Victoria Park for over a decade, she declined to give her last name. But she said that much of the repair work she’s seen at the building is substandard.

“The truth about it is we don’t really get things fixed up. To me it’s a lot of Band-Aid,” she said. By her count, only about half the work is good quality. She’s “very pleased” with bathroom fixtures that were installed, but says when TCHC sent in painters they didn’t clean the walls or properly patch them up before putting on a fresh coat.

The major maintenance being done to the building’s roof and parking garage “does make a difference in our life,” she said. But she questions why the agency waited until water began to leak into tenants’ apartments before replacing the roof. “Why fix it now in this late stage?” she asked. “There’s a lot of damage.”

Marina currently lives on the fourth floor in a two-bedroom apartment with her two teenage children, one of whom is disabled and needs her own space. She says that her family’s been on a waiting list to be relocated to a larger apartment for years. No matter how much work Murray and his team does, Marina isn’t optimistic that 2743 Victoria Park will ever be a nice place to live.

“To me it’s a waste of money. It’s putting good money on something that’s bad, that’s not going to get better,” she said. “Sooner or later I hope we can move.”

The satisfied customer

For Teresa Szymanski, TCHC has been a kind of salvation. Before she moved into her building at 248 Simcoe 12 years ago, she was living with her two children in a homeless shelter. She now shares her two-bedroom unit with her 22-year-old son.

“This is a fantastic building. I love living here,” she declared on Monday as she showed off her new kitchen and bathroom, both renovated before Easter as part of a TCHC state-of-good repair program. Tenants in all 107 of the building’s apartments were given forms and asked to check off parts of their units that needed fixing. By the time a pair of two-man crews is finished working their way through the building this summer, 72 apartments will have been repaired, at a cost of about $5,000 each.

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Before the renovation, Szymanski said, her kitchen cabinets were falling apart, the stove was coated in grease, the pipes under the kitchen sink leaked, and the sink in the bathroom was so rusted out she worried about cutting herself on it. She said that when the contractors gutted the walls of the shower, they found black mould growing inside.

For years she had been requesting repairs, only to be told there was no budget. She was thrilled when the renovations were finally done.

“I was like, my God, is this my apartment?” she said, grinning.

Szymanski and her neighbours are better off than many tenants living in TCHC. Their downtown 12-storey building near University Ave. and Dundas St. W was only built in 1991 and isn’t in as rough shape as older TCHC properties.

But even at Simcoe there are persistent problems. Once the TCHC personnel left, Szymanski pulled a reporter aside and took out her phone to show photos of her window, the interior edges of which were lined with frost last winter. When it melted, it left puddles of water inside her apartment and she says spawned more black mould.

Now the window sill is “so nasty” her son is afraid to touch it, she said. She asked TCHC for help “but they say there’s no money.”

The corporation

TCHC provides homes to 164,000 people in low- and moderate-income households, employs more than 1,500 people, and for the past five years has been one of the city’s least stable agencies.

In 2011, the organization’s board and CEO were fired in the wake of a spending and procurement scandal. In April 2014, Eugene Jones became the second TCHC CEO in three years to leave under a cloud, after a damning ombudsman’s report on human resource practices at the agency.

A year later, TCHC is still without a permanent leader (former vice-president Greg Spearn is serving in an interim capacity). As the Star reported recently, the board has suspended its search for a new CEO pending a task force’s report on the agency’s governance structure. The task force, appointed by Mayor John Tory (open John Tory's policard) and led by Senator Art Eggleton, is expected to make its final recommendations in December, and they could include a proposal to break TCHC up into smaller, more manageable organizations.

Until the report is released the housing agency is “in a holding pattern,” according to Councillor Ana Bailao, a TCHC board member and chair of the Affordable Housing Committee.

Looming over this period of uncertainty is the agency’s massive repair bill, which in 2013 was estimated at $2.6 billion over ten years. The origins of the backlog predate the recent turmoil at TCHC — housing advocates have attributed it, at least in part, to a history of insufficient investment in the decades before the province downloaded social housing onto the city during the Mike Harris years.

The city has pledged one third of the $2.6 billion cost, and by the end of this year it plans to have spent $370.7 million on maintenance since 2013. But unless the provincial and federal governments come up with the other two-thirds, TCHC warns that more than three quarters of its housing stock could fall into poor or critical condition by 2023, and it could be forced to board up 7,500 of its homes.

Although neither Ottawa nor Queen’s Park has signalled any intent to bridge the funding gap, Bailao believes this year’s federal election is a golden opportunity to press the city’s case. She’s buoyed by a poll released on Tuesday that found 21 per cent of Torontonians believe TCHC repairs should be the city’s top funding priority. “Every federal party should be addressing this issue,” the councillor said.

But what if the other governments aren’t forthcoming with funding for TCHC repairs?

“I think that everybody’s contemplating Plan B, to be honest,” Bailao said. “But the plan is to not let them off the hook, and that is the main thing.”