Family homeless after fire

Tanika Gordon (left) offers her mother Elaine a tissue to deal with her tears.

By Hedy Korbee

A Birch Cliff family is temporarily homeless after a fire in their apartment building at Kingston Rd. and Manderly Dr. last week that sent five people to hospital suffering from smoke inhalation.

Elaine Gordon and her 22-year old daughter Tanika say they feel lucky to be alive, but now face the daunting task of finding a new place to live and replacing most of their belongings that were damaged in the fire.

“It just sucks,” Tanika says. “We keep telling ourselves that at least we got out.  At least we’re here.  At least we’re safe.  But it still doesn’t take away the fact that we’ve been in that apartment for 19 years and we’re throwing away all our furniture that we’ve had since we’ve been there.”

This photo of the window of Elaine and Tanika Gordon's apartment was taken after they got out. Photo courtesy of Larry Thorne.

Cause of fire unknown

Elaine and Tanika ran for their lives after the fire broke out at 5:30am last Friday, filling their apartment with smoke and forcing the evacuation of the entire building.

Captain Mike Strapko of Toronto Fire says the blaze started in the bedroom of the apartment directly below the Gordon family but the official cause is undetermined.  The investigation is now closed.

Toronto Fire has estimated damage throughout the building to be $250,000.

Elaine was crying when we first met her on the day of the fire and she was still crying yesterday when we caught up with her at Tim Horton’s in Cliffside.

“I’ve been struggling my whole life and sometimes just as you start to stand up…. (starts to cry)”

Beds, dressers, clothing thrown away

Gordon bathroom needs major work

The Gordon apartment is uninhabitable.

The bedroom Elaine shared with Tanika has been boarded up because an inspector says the floor might collapse.

The only bathroom needs to be completely rebuilt.

Most of their clothes were thrown away but only after Elaine did 24 loads of laundry to try to remove the smell of smoke.

They had no choice but to put their beds and dressers in the garbage.

“That bed means a lot more to me than you think,” Tanika says.  “I didn’t have a bed for a long time.  So when I finally got that bed it meant a lot.  So throwing out when it’s a perfectly good bed, that kind of stung.”

Hallway in Gordon apartment

Single mother working to make ends meet

Elaine Gordon is a single mother who commutes to Mississauga every day in order to work at a call centre.

On that salary, she supports a 26-year old son who is developmentally delayed, another son who is 16-years old, and helps out Tanika who also works.

They all lived together in the two-bedroom apartment, but the young men spent weekdays at their grandparents while Elaine was at work.

Now the entire family is living with Gordon’s parents, along with an aunt who is undergoing chemotherapy.

“It’s just the displacement that’s the most uncomfortable part,” Tanika says.  “We’re not home.  We’re living out of boxes and bags.”

Requested a vacant unit

As long-time tenants who’ve lived in the building for almost two decades, Elaine says she called the landlord and asked to be moved into an identical vacant unit across the hall.

According to Elaine, the landlord originally agreed, but told her she would have to pay an extra $75 a month in rent.  She already pays $922 a month and says can’t afford it.

“Why are you raising the rent?  I’m not asking to move. I’m moving because I have to. I can’t stay in here,” Gordon says.  “I didn’t start the fire. It’s not my fault.”

The next day, Elaine says he told her the apartment was unavailable because it was already rented.

Landlord Gulu Thadani, President of 1034523 Ontario Ltd., has a different version of events.

Thadani says he promised Gordon the apartment over the phone on Sunday but said he needed to check if it was already rented.

On Monday he says he called the building superintendent and discovered it was already leased for March 1st.

“Something I don’t have, I can’t offer,” Thadani says.

Thadani told Birch Cliff News that Gordon can have a smaller apartment for $900 a month.  Gordon says he mentioned other units but never said anything about lower rent.  She says she was left to believe the rent increase applied there as well.

Gordon apartment

Hard feelings

There’s clearly hard feelings between landlord and tenant. Thadani called the Gordon’s “abusive” for not having tenant insurance.

“I’ve never met someone so callous in my life,” Tanika says.  “It’s not that we want him to give us money for all the contents.  That was our thing. We should have had content insurance. We understand that.  It’s more can we have the apartment across the hall so we have somewhere to sleep.”

Finding somewhere to sleep is indeed the biggest problem.

Elaine and Tanika have looked at other apartments in Birch Cliff and says they can’t find anything for less than $1,100 a month, but the problem is bigger than that, according to Tanika.

“We don’t have the money to pay first and last somewhere else.”  We just don’t”.

Despite their ordeal, Elaine is trying to stay positive.  She is, after all, no stranger to adversity.

“You have to try and look at it positively and say we struggle now and later on it will be better.  The whole year can’t be like this.  It can’t get any worse.”