A mom on disability, a son, a grandma and their cat have been forced to live apart after being renovicted from their New Westminster apartment.
The New Westminster Tenants Union highlighted the woman’s heart-wrenching story at a rally on the steps of city hall Monday night, prior to council’s consideration of a bylaws aimed at preventing renovictions. More than 50 people attended the rally which featured a number of speakers, including Melissa Roth, an organizer with the tenants group, who read the statement by a woman whose identity is being protected.
“I lived in my apartment on Seventh Street in New West for 15 years before being renovicted last summer. I was renovicted with my family – my elderly mother and my son, even though we had nowhere to go. We are all homeless now,” she wrote. “I am a single mom on disability, as a person with multiple barriers. The owners of my old building wouldn’t even let me rent a suite in the reno’ed building – even at the increased cost.”
The woman, who we’ll call Elizabeth, believes she’s been discriminated against during her search for housing, as rental companies won’t rent to her when they find out she is homeless and on disability, even though she has the damage deposit and monthly disability payments.
“My son is staying with a friend so he has as much stability as possible to continue at school here in New West, but this has traumatized him. He is transgender and he is struggling even more because of this,” said Elizabeth. “I am devastated daily by not being able to be there for him, not being able to see him every day. My mother is now in the hospital. The doctors tell me she isn’t going to make it. I think she lost the will to live after losing her home, and I can’t stand it. I can’t stand that there is nothing I can do.”
Elizabeth has access to her brother and sister-in-law’s home and trailer in Port Coquitlam, but the trailer doesn’t have heat and she doesn’t want to be a burden on her family.
“I have hardly enough money on my Compass card to visit my mother, to see my son, to keep looking for a home and to ensure that everyone has food to eat,” she said in a statement. “I even had to leave my beloved cat of nine years with someone else in Burnaby as I have no home to keep her. However, she escaped and I didn’t think I would ever see her again. My heart broke when my son asked if we would ever have a cat again. I told him of course we will.”
Elizabeth said family shelters are full and there’s no room on the lists for housing.
“I have never been in this position before. I have never been homeless. I don’t know what else I can do but keep putting my name on waiting lists for apartments,” she said. “I don’t want to live in PoCo. I don’t want to leave New West. I never wanted to leave my home of 15 years. If we weren’t renovicted from Lori-Ann apartments, we would all be fine right now. We would be living together, happy and healthy. We must stop these renovictions from hurting anyone else.”
Roth noted the one piece of good news in Elizabeth’s story is that the cat was found, after making its way from Burnaby to its former home in New Westminster and being found by a neighbour.
