On her first night at 220 Oak St. last November, Debra Hickman knew she’d made a mistake.

The red, angry bites soon appeared — bedbugs.

Even as she tried to keep one invasion at bay, cockroaches crept in next, sneaking into belongings she was forced to box up again.

She tried as best she could to settle into a new life in the public housing building, proud to have gotten all her polished wood furniture upstairs and neatly arranged.

But no matter how much she tried to clean her unit in the highrise — even after several professional chemical sprays — the bugs just wouldn’t stay away.

“Now they’re everywhere,” Hickman recently said of the ongoing problem. “Climbing up the walls.”

The petite former funeral director moved into the Toronto Community Housing building, just outside the borders of the newly revitalized Regent Park, after trouble at home.

“I’m down to my last choice and this was it,” she said in February.

But after arriving, she was told not to walk the stairwells — where residents warn of drug deals and drug use — and was harassed at times when she’d step outside her apartment door and into the elevator.

Leaving one bad situation, she found herself in a waking nightmare.

“What kind of life is that?”

The towering, unimaginative prism of brown brick walls and beige balconies — a familiar public housing facade in this city — is easily spotted from the road, tucked south of Gerrard St. E., between River St. and the Don River. The cul-de-sac it sits on at the end of Oak St. is easily avoided in the downtown’s east end; there are few shops here or reasons to get off the streetcar.

The cream caulking that divides the 27 storeys gives the impression each floor was just stacked there, whole, to house the nearly 500 people who live inside.

Since it was built more than five decades ago, 220 Oak has become known for brutal stabbings, fatal shootings, brazen drug dealing, rampant bedbugs.

These are symptoms of living in poverty without support, of crumbling public housing infrastructure and a lack of real community inside what the city has dubbed community housing.

Toronto Community Housing, the authority that is essentially landlord, identified the highrise as one of the most troubled in its portfolio of more than 2,200 properties.

Once a seniors’ building, the bachelor and one-bedroom-only units became a draw for the recently homeless and predominantly single males. That change also saw a growing challenge of mental illness and addictions. In the past five years, emergency room visits and calls for police officers, firefighters and paramedics have dramatically escalated. On the frequent bad days, there have been four to six calls to EMS within less than 24 hours.

But the cash-strapped TCHC, faced with a $2.56-billion backlog of needed repairs across the city, lacked the resources needed to tackle both the physical and emotional traumas.

When local not-for-profit Cota — which has worked with people living with mental illness and other challenges in Toronto for 40 years — stepped forward in 2013 and asked how they could help, officials at TCHC introduced them to 220 Oak.

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Since December, a team of seven workers has been embedded on the ground floor six days a week, with the goal of improving the quality of life for the people inside. Operating at first with money from their own reserves, the provincially funded Toronto Central Local Health Integration Network has since agreed to help finance a pilot until the end of April 2016.

For the past nine months, photojournalist Marta Iwanek and I have been getting to know the building’s residents, following Cota’s progress and documenting the daily challenges both have faced.

Debra Hickman’s experience is just one story. In the past year, there have been so many others to tell.

Before the city tore the highrises down in neighbouring Regent Park — the last one demolished earlier this year — they were a symbol of what had gone wrong with low-income housing, what had become islands for drugs and gangs and misery.

Renewed social design in places such as Regent Park has seen the demolition of every public housing highrise in sight, as planners and architects blend those neighbourhoods back into the map.

Now, 220 Oak St. is one of the last reminders of the past, with no plans to redevelop and few options for rehousing residents.

“It is one of the more challenging buildings,” says Greg Spearn, TCHC’s interim CEO. “These things move at glacial speed. There’s no quick fix.”

But on the ground, somebody needed to put in the work of reaching out to the 220 Oak residents who have long been overlooked, with the belief that real change — the kind that lasts — starts with happier, healthier tenants.

But first, the Cota team would have to earn the residents’ trust.

With such a diverse range of challenges, they realized they needed to start with the basics. So they put on a pot of coffee every morning, offered snacks to those who dropped by, lent out soap, stocked up on treats and litter for the pets that keep residents grounded.

Progress happens little by little, the team knows. Cats or coffee could be a small way into an otherwise closed door, a guarded heart.

The Cota team is still being warily watched by some residents who are unsure about these outsiders.

But manager Norine Thompson, a veteran of this work, nudges her team to have patience, to be persistent.

There’s a lot of work to be done. And remember, she says: “We’re in their house.”

Correction - October 8, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated the full name of the LHIN.



A brief timeline of 220 Oak St.

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