Mandy absolutely loved her spacious and airy two-bedroom market rent unit on Jones Ave.

“It was the most beautiful apartment I’ve lived in ... it’s huge,” she said.

But the articulate single mom, who has a Master’s Degree in Information Studies, says she was forced to move out of her Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) apartment this past week after just 13 months because of constant noise, bullying and intimidation by her neighbours — low-rent tenants she calls TCHC “lifers.”

“They lived up to every stereotype in the book,” she said.

Mandy, who asked me that I not use her real name because she still fears retaliation against her and her five-year-old daughter, moved into the TCHC unit last April after she lost her job.

Although she’s relocated to the Annex and now has a new job, she felt compelled to come forward with her story because, as she put it, it speaks to a “microcosm of TCHC and incompetence at large.”

She’s now paying $1,500 a month for an apartment half the size of the TCHC unit, for which she paid $1,140 a month plus $100 for hydro.

(That’s about three or four times what a rent-geared-to-income (RGI) tenant would pay for the same-sized unit.)

As I’ve heard repeatedly at TCHC board meetings, the market units are relied upon to subsidize the rest of the housing authority’s rental pool.

Mandy says she only had a few blissful weeks in her new home last year before her 20-something neighbours started leaving their two dogs (one a Husky) out in the sun on their 10-by-5-foot balcony, causing the dogs to howl for hours on end.

After she complained to the city about the barking, the tenants began calling her obscene names in front of her young daughter and threatening her with “big trouble” if she continued to complain about them.

She said the seemingly unemployed boyfriend of the actual tenant (TCHC confirmed in a June 2016 e-mail to her that he is not on the unit’s lease) spent the entire day in the warm months smoking pot on the balcony and blasting music.

To add insult to injury, she said many of the RGI tenants refused to cooperate with plans to spray for cockroaches throughout the units, because it involved too much effort to move everything.

Mandy said she had to go “all the way up the food chain” at TCHC to finally get cooperation.

Asked why her neighbours weren’t evicted for this constant harassment, she said the female tenant agreed to mediation at the Landlord and Tenant Board.

She says she complained many times to the Don Valley Beaches Operating Unit Manager, John Perkovic, who never returned a single call from her.

Mandy adds that TCHC officials appear to be too lazy to build a case to evict tenants who are abusing the system or who are bullying and destroying another tenant’s rights to quiet enjoyment of their unit.

Mandy says she tried all the “proper channels” but finally gave up when the warm weather and the barking returned and the “lifers” blared their humongous TVs continuously during the Stanley Cup playoffs.

“By doing nothing they (TCHC officials) made the situation worse,” she said. “It demonstrates to tenants there’s no need to take complaints seriously ... it’s almost like systemic rot.”

A TCHC insider familiar with this kind of situation told me officials traditionally send warning letter after warning letter to problem tenants, who usually ignore the letters.

The insider said warning letters are not the answer to controlling problem tenants.

Nor are the agreements made with problem tenants at the LTB, because often the complaints and the warning letters start all over again.

“The complainants become frustrated and end up moving out,” says the insider. “There has to be a better way ... We lose a lot of good tenants because of this procedure.”

But TCHC spokesperson Brayden Akers claims “every complaint” Mandy made was “resolved” through the complaint process and routine maintenance done — including elimination of the pests in this complex.

He added that there’s no vacancy problem in this complex, that turnover is very low and the complex fully occupied except for Mandy’s unit.

In fact, he says, at the end of April, they only had 129 market units sitting vacant throughout the entire portfolio.

Akers said they’re unable to comment on mediated agreements reached at the LTB and if they get information that a tenant has breached an agreement, they “pursue eviction.”

As if.