Blue tarps paint roofs and wooden boards cover shattered windows in Uxbridge, Ont., three months after a devastating tornado hit the town northeast of Toronto.
Uprooted trees and torn-up houses surround one of the city’s few apartment buildings still missing a roof after it was ripped off by the storm. Tenants have been unable to return to their homes as contractors work to make the site habitable again — but on a recent sunny weekday, some of the building’s former residents were not far from the site.
Carol West works across the street as a cleaner at the train station that was also badly damaged in the May 21 storm. She kept her work supplies — and some other belongings — in the back of her vehicle because she and her partner are still living in a hotel while they look for an affordable rental unit.
The couple is on a tight schedule, with a Sept. 1 move-in date for the hotel in Oshawa, Ont., and no place to move into as of last Thursday.
“We’ve been looking and looking for months and months,” West, 60, said from a picnic bench across the street from the home she’s lived in for four years. The apartments she has seen are either out of her price range, unaffordable or in poor condition, she said. “I’m starting to get depressed.”
Several of the couple’s neighbors in the building have also found themselves priced out of the city’s tight rental market as they wait for their former home to be repaired.
Tenants in about 40 units were displaced after the storm, Uxbridge Mayor Dave Barton said. Affordable and available rental housing was already limited in the city, as is the case in many communities across Ontario.
But the storm, which prompted a local state of emergency in Uxbridge and other communities in the greater Toronto area, brought the issue to a head, Barton said, because the tornado’s path took him to three of the city’s only multi-family buildings .
“It made it almost impossible to find housing in the borough of Uxbridge,” Barton said. “We had a significant number of people who had to move out of town.”
Some tenants have stayed with family and friends in the area. Others who couldn’t find accommodation, like West and her partner, were taken to hotels and then placed in student apartments at Durham College in Oshawa. But they’ve moved in the last few weeks to make room for students about to arrive for the school year.
Amanda Shier, another tenant in the damaged King Street flat, moved in with her family from Durham College residences in July. The closest affordable place Shier could find was in the small farming community of Zephyr, Ont., a 20-minute drive outside the city where they had built their lives.
“It’s really hard to get displaced from that,” she said “We really tried when we got a new rental to at least be in the city and that didn’t work.”
The move has meant a big adjustment for Shier’s nine-year-old son, who attends school and other activities such as swimming and karate lessons in Uxbridge, and for Shier herself, who still works at a daycare in Uxbridge and finds herself of driving her old one. home every day.
Now that the initial stress of finding accommodation is over, Shier’s family are sorting out logistics such as longer commutes to Uxbridge for work and their son being bused to school in September.
“It’s really overwhelming to think about what’s coming next and how long it’s going to take,” he said. “Although we have a place to live, it’s not settled.”
Barton, the mayor, said property owners have also faced delays from understaffed contractors as cleanup continues slowly, although there is a tight schedule to fix things like roofs as the wet winter approaches.
May’s natural disaster that swept through southern Ontario and Quebec left at least 11 people dead and toppled trees and power lines in its wake, along with widespread damage to buildings.
The tornado that hit Uxbridge was embedded in a derecho, a windstorm associated with a series of storms. Such events are considered unusual in Canada, but experts said they may become more frequent in the coming years as climate change drives temperatures higher.
Barton said the city was preparing for more severe events fueled by climate change with a recent culvert project that lifted the downtown area out of a flood plain. It helped prevent serious flooding during the May storm, Barton said, but “didn’t help us with the wind, unfortunately.”
Longer term, Burton said the city is also looking to work on the housing shortage by encouraging more development downtown that would include rental housing, though he notes those projects will take some time.
Solutions for the financial crisis are also part of the plan to rebuild Trinity United Church in Uxbridge.
The building is still torn off due to the roof and other damage caused by the tornado, and a sign with information about the last Sunday before the storm hangs from its hinges. Despite the damage, a newer sign on the fence outside the building asks people to “have faith” and offers this promise: “We will be back in one form or another to play our part in the community.”
The insurance coverage will fall well short of the money needed to fully rebuild the historic building as it was, said Treasurer and Trustee Chairman Ted Meyers. With that in mind, the church is now leaning toward a complete demolition and rebuild that will redefine the space to better suit the changing needs of the church and its community.
Meyers said the vision includes a much smaller worship space for the shrinking congregation, community facilities and another structure that will hopefully hold between 100 and 120 affordable rental units.
It’s a plan the church considered for a while and was forced to consider with more urgency after the tornado, he said.
“We will now be able to focus more on what the church can do for the community and make the community a better place for everyone,” Meyers said.
“Maybe that was a blessing.”
