Neither rain nor cold could stop a group of Waterloo tenants living at 145 MacGregor Crescent from making their voices heard.
The group stood outside their building Saturday afternoon, picketing against renovictions they claim to be facing.
Members of Waterloo Region ACORN, a tenants’ union, and tenants living at the MacGregor Crescent property gathered outside the front of the building at 1 p.m. Saturday, rallying against the changes their landlord had begun to make at their residence.
Emanuel Melo, a tenant and ACORN union leader, was one of the group members who led the picket line.
“We’ve been fighting this since October,” he said. ”We’ve been going to meetings; we’ve been talking to the press. And, at this point, we said, ‘you know what? We just need to get out there and spread the word in the community,’ because in this area, there’s a lot of low-rise buildings it seems to be what these landlords target. To kick people out onto the streets for profit when it’s middle to low income people, that is just morally and legally wrong.”
The group told CTV News they had also been dealing with subpar living conditions since they’re building was bought by a new landlord last year.
They claim the landlord had not been keeping the building clean and functional, with some complaints being about unkempt floors, a lack of hot water and a removal of storage units that some said they’ve been using for at least a decade.
The tenants also said the landlord has remained faceless ever since buying the property in 2024, only knowing the landlord by the name of “MacGregor PIM Inc,” to whom they pay their rent, or “Alveda Management,” who they claim has been on site three times since purchasing the property.
They claim that the only way they can try to get in contact with the landlord is through a maintenance representative who is occasionally on site.
Melo, who is a single father, lives in a unit with his three sons. They’ve been living in their apartment since December 2018. At that time, they were renting under a different landlord.
“We got very little information about the new owner. We barely see them. There’s no communication,” he said.
Alveda Management confirmed to CTV News in an email that they issued N13 notices to four of the 15 units at the property since purchasing the building in November 2024. They said the renovations were “necessary and justified” due to the units being in “extremely poor conditions.”
According to Tribunals Ontario, an N13 is a notice to end tenancy because the landlord wants to demolish, repair or convert a rental unit for non-residential use.
The tenants said those who received an N13 notice had until March 31 to move out, something they said had already happened to tenants in at least two units prior.
“I’m not moving out at this point because I know the minute I do, my place is gone and on disability I won’t be able to afford to house my children.” said Melo. “I will fight and die for my children and there’s no way that they’re going to break my family apart.”
“The homelessness in Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge area, even in Ontario, it’s absolute ludicrous,” said Diana Decaire, a tenant who’s lived in the building for 16 years. “It has to stop and it’s not going to stop if we just sit by and we don’t do anything, we have to unite.”
Decaire said she and the other tenants believe the landlord is going to build each unit one by one in “disruptive ways,” in hopes of driving tenants out, such as through a lack of cleaning and garbage disposal, renovations late into the evenings and a lack of snow removal.
“Snow removal was done twice this year. This winter we couldn’t even get out. If there would have been an emergency, we wouldn’t have been able to get out… so, they’re trying to drive us out by not taking care of it.”
The City of Waterloo confirmed in an email to CTV News that the property of 145 MacGregor Crescent currently has no building permits.
With an uncertain future, the tenants at 145 MacGregor Crescent show no signs of slowing.
“The single mom next door, the 82 year old man that’s been here 42 years. These are people’s lives and low to middle income people. We don’t have a ton of money. We can’t just go buy a house,” said Melo. “I’m on ODSP with three children that I’m raising as best as I can. Four of us in a two bedroom apartment doing what we can and now we have to deal with possibly being on the street.”
