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Karen Crane’s top-floor apartment is neatly furnished with a breathtaking view — but her living room looks like a construction site.
Crane’s couches are covered with drop cloths and the floorboards have been pulled up throughout the living room, revealing the concrete slab. Under her patio door, a swath of drywall has been removed, exposing concrete, metal shards and protruding nails.
She says the unit has been in this condition for months, and issues have been recurring for years.
“I am an educated person … I’m a woman who has some resilience,” Crane, 62, said in an interview. “But I’m broken down a little bit here, you know, I’m fading.”
Crane, a registered nurse, said shortly after she moved into her apartment on Walter Havill Drive in Halifax’s Armdale neighbourhood in the fall of 2015, she began noticing the heat wasn’t working and sometimes the floor near the patio door was wet.
Then came full-blown flooding that covered the living room floor on multiple occasions.
Almost a decade later, the flooding issue hasn’t been fixed, she said, despite an order in her favour from the province’s residential tenancies program, and an order from a municipal building official for repairs to be completed by the end of April.
Crane said she feels the government systems aren’t working.
“I don’t think it’s meant to be that way, but there seems to be holes that need to be tightened up,” she said.
Nora MacIntosh, a staff lawyer with Nova Scotia Legal Aid in Halifax, says her office hears from tenants “very regularly” who struggle to get repairs completed in their rentals.
“The frustrating part is that a lot of the time the advice that we can give doesn’t feel very great, because there aren’t very many options that people can access to get repairs completed,” MacIntosh told CBC News in an interview.
MacIntosh voiced concerns that have been long held by both tenants and landlords that the residential tenancy system lacks enforcement capabilities.
Meanwhile, the head of the residential tenancies program insists there is a way to enforce repairs — it just may not be well known.
Exhausting all options
Crane said over the years, her landlord, Navid Saberi of United Gulf Developments Ltd., sent different people in to assess the flooding and heat issues and try to fix them, but nothing worked for long.
She said dealing with family health issues and working through the COVID-19 pandemic as a nurse took all her attention and the years passed by.
“My question to anybody who stayed in an apartment that was not being repaired for eight years, six years, 10 years, is why didn’t you leave,” she said.
Crane said she stayed because she loved her apartment, her rent was affordable for her, and she believed the issue would be fixed.
Finally in 2024, she turned to the province’s residential tenancies program that regulates disputes between tenants and landlords through hearings, then issues decisions called orders of the director.
Crane didn’t ask for money, just repairs. The tenancy officer ruled in her favour in September 2024.
By December 2024, the heat issue was fixed but the flooding wasn’t. Crane called Halifax municipal services and a residential building official visited her apartment. He ordered the repairs be completed by April 30, 2025.
“He said, ‘This is terrible, this is going to be repaired in a month.’ I said, ‘You sure?'” Crane said.
Since the April deadline passed, Crane said she contacted the building official multiple times but he has not returned.
She said after CBC News visited her building for an interview and contacted all parties involved, the municipal building official and her landlord’s maintenance supervisor both contacted her to address the repairs.
Crane said the inspector gave the landlord an extension until August, and Crane has another residential tenancies hearing booked for July 16.
Halifax Regional Municipality declined a request from CBC News to interview a representative from the building standards department.
“Staff are not able to speak to the specifics of any individual case, but I can tell you that building officials utilize ‘notice of violations’,” spokesperson Sarah Brannen said in an email. “These notices ensure the owner is fully informed of deficiencies and establish a reasonable timeline to have the work completed.”
Brannen said the next step is an “order to comply,” then if the work still isn’t completed by the end of the time frame, the final option is “the municipality completing the work under a remedy process or referring the matter to the courts.”
Provincial official recommends tenants file for rent abatement
Melissa Mosher, the director of residential tenancies, said she could not address Crane’s specific case for privacy reasons, but for “anyone struggling to get repairs made, it must be difficult for them, frustrating, I imagine not the way someone wants to live.”
Mosher recommended tenants in this situation request a rent abatement, or reduction in rent, until repairs are done.
She said without a rent abatement being ordered, it “could be a little bit more difficult” for a tenant to enforce repairs. For this reason, she said her department is working on changing the forms used to apply for a hearing to make it clearer that filing for a rent abatement is an option.
“It’s certainly something that … I want to be used more often because I think it’s a much more effective way,” Mosher said. “It’s something that I’d like to work on to try to improve with my team.”
No response from landlord
Property records show Crane’s building is owned by a numbered company. Nova Scotia’s Registry of Joint Stock Companies shows the director and president of the company is Saberi, who is also the chairman of United Gulf Developments Inc., a company that owns and develops residential and commercial properties in the Halifax area.
CBC News attempted to contact Saberi through his company and through the property manager at Crane’s building, but did not receive a response by deadline.
MacIntosh, the lawyer, said she isn’t representing Crane in this case, but she has previously represented a tenant in Crane’s building who had a similar flooding issue and also struggled to enforce the repairs.