KITCHENER — Used syringes are sprinkled here and there. Vacant apartments are littered with trash and human feces. Windows have been smashed in, replaced with plywood. The fire alarms aren't working.
That's the scene at 154 Erb St. E. in Waterloo, a crumbling 35-unit apartment building that rent-paying tenants have been fleeing en masse as squatters and addicts float in, seeking a free place to get high.
For bylaw officials, it all looks awfully familiar.
Last summer, the same problems played out at 48 Weber St. W., an apartment complex in Kitchener. The common denominator? Both buildings were owned by Terry Good, one of Waterloo Region's most notorious landlords.
"It's been all hell living here," said Stephen Thompson, 23, who has lived at 154 Erb with his young family for two and a half years. "You can't reach anybody to fix anything. The last number they gave us for a property manager, it's been disconnected."
From a sewage backflow in the laundry room to homeless squatters to fire hazards to mould to electrical problems — not to mention the constant obstacles to getting anything fixed — he's had enough.
Thompson and his family are moving out at the end of the month. They're not the only ones. Most of the tenants on his side of the building have already left.
"I'm pretty sure this building will just end up being condemned," he said.
The few tenants still here say they're tired of the fights with addicts roaming the hallways. Police are called regularly, but the drug dealing hasn't stopped — and with it, a constant flow of strangers breaking into vacant apartments and treating the place as a public washroom.
Bylaw officials, having spent years battling the landlord, just want Good to sell the property. The problems at 48 Weber St. only stopped after the building was sold to a new owner, who cleaned it up and invested in extensive renovations.
The sale came after city officials, fed up with trying to get Good to bring the property up to basic bylaw standards, were forced to declare it unfit for human habitation and removed all remaining tenants and squatters.
Where is Terry Good?
Good has been a challenge for local bylaw authorities for a long time. He has owned about a dozen properties around Kitchener and Waterloo, and has a reputation as a troublesome landlord that stretches back more than 40 years.
The accusations against him include hiking students' rent beyond regulated limits in the 1980s, and imposing a surcharge on gay tenants in the 1970s — a strange allegation, since Good himself was later in a gay relationship that ended with shotgun blasts on his front porch.
In the past 10 years, there have been 21 formal complaints filed with the Landlord and Tenant Board by tenants at his properties around Waterloo Region, according to a Freedom of Information request.
They detail allegations ranging from harassment and illegal charges to fire code violations, collapsed ceilings, unstable balconies, rodent infestations, mould and other neglected repairs. Other tenants alleged Good broke conditions of the lease, entered their units illegally and misled renters on how utilities were to be paid for.
He's been a difficult landlord for municipal bylaw officials for a long time, too.
"There are few landlords who are known to us who have multiple properties and who are unresponsive until they're pushed to the point of legal action," said Shayne Turner, director of municipal enforcement services for the City of Waterloo.
"Their unresponsive attitudes make us have to go the full limit of our legal authority, and that creates challenges for the tenants as well. The longer the landlord drags this out, the longer the repairs remain undone."
Good can be hard to reach at the best of times, say bylaw officials, fire department inspectors and tenants. He has relied on a rotating network of property managers, maintains no local office and registers some of his apartments through a numbered company.
The obstacles to tracking him down can mean long delays to get his properties up to bylaw standards. Tenants often wait months for repairs while the city fights with the landlord in court, Turner said — an exercise that can cost municipalities thousands and drain scarce resources.
Good has not responded to repeated requests for interviews for this story.
Two properties he's known to have lived at in the past, in Kitchener and in a rural community north of Cobourg, appear to be abandoned.
His house at 101 Mount Hope St. in Kitchener has been left to deteriorate. This winter, the city shut off the water to the property after pipes burst and caused flooding. One of the eaves troughs is falling off, the mail is piling up inside the front door, the windows have frosted over and the property is badly overgrown.
The neighbours say they haven't seen Good in months, although another man comes by occasionally to shovel the walkway. The rental house next door, also owned by Good, looks abandoned, too.
His rural property outside Baltimore, Ont. where he owns two cottages, is in an equal state of neglect. A BMW 645Ci, a luxury car that retails for over $90,000, sits in the driveway under a foot of snow, with expired licence plates.
More mail is piled up at the doors. The cottages appear to have once been nicely appointed, with thoughtful landscaping, artwork and sculpture, but now are falling apart. It looks like wild animals have taken over both buildings.
Good, who moved to the municipality over 15 years ago, is known to be reclusive. But his recent vanishing act has still puzzled people in the rural community.
He and his live-in partner Eleanor Olmstead were once vocal activists at municipal meetings there, opposing all manner of development in the township. They had a reputation as aggressive "tree huggers" who clashed regularly with municipal planners and politicians.
About three years ago, the pair stopped showing up to public meetings, and all but disappeared from the community's public scene.
"We haven't missed him one bit," said Raymond Benns, Good's neighbour and a councillor in Alnwick/Haldimand Township, where he guessed Good owns at least 250 acres of land.
"He's quite set in his ways. He's very aggressive, and sometimes can be very pugnacious."
Some have speculated Good has retreated to Costa Rica, where he reportedly owns a vacation property, but no one knows for sure.
Olmstead, described occasionally as his business partner, could not be reached for comment. Ron Folkes, Good's Brampton-based lawyer, also refused to talk about his client.
Finding complaints about Good's rental properties is not hard. But finding Good? That's another issue.
"Good luck," said Adam Hoffman, a former property manager at 154 Erb who quit in frustration almost a year ago. "He stopped responding to me entirely, and he owes money to a number of service providers."
Along with frustrated tenants, neighbours, fire officials and bylaw inspectors, Good has left behind a string of unpaid contractors, cleaners, landscapers, and other repair technicians who have done work at his properties and are left chasing unpaid bills, he said.
The City of Kitchener's battle with Good over 48 Weber St. W. dragged on for more than a year. The 40-unit apartment building had substandard plumbing and electrical wiring, some structural damage and fire hazards.
Neighbours complained the old building, built in 1930, had become a menace — home to squatters, drug dealing and frequent partying. A police raid there in June seized about $8,000 worth of crystal meth, heroin and cocaine, plus $4,800 in cash.
Last May, the Kitchener Fire Department placed 48 Weber St. W. under a fire watch, and security guards were brought in to guard it around the clock. In July, seeing no action from the landlord, bylaw officials arrived with police and cleared out the building, sending about a dozen tenants to a local motel.
The ordered the property sealed up, and Good ultimately sold the building to a Toronto-based property developer for $1.5 million. Some tenants say they have not been able to settle into stable new housing since.
But the landlord's fight with city officials hasn't ended there. In December, the City of Waterloo won its latest court battle with Good, getting a judge to fine him $4,000 for ongoing property standards violations at a rental property on John Street.
Problems date back decades
Good's behaviour as a landlord has been drawing complaints from his tenants for decades.
In April 1986, a provincial commissioner with the Residential Tenancy Commission ruled that Good had overcharged student renters at 10 Austin Dr. in Waterloo by $28,795.
The commissioner said the 40 University of Waterloo and Laurier students at the 15-unit building had been overcharged by about $175 a month beyond the regulated limit.
The commission's ruling prompted students in another apartment building at 401 Hazel St., a property also managed by Good, to claim they had also been overcharged and apply for rent rebates.
In March 1975, three Waterloo women complained to the Ontario Human Rights Commission that Good raised their rent after learning one of them was gay. The women alleged that Good saw lesbian literature on their bookshelf, asked if they were gay, and explained to rent would need to increase by $15 a month as "a form of insurance."
He later told a Record reporter most landlords "in this town wouldn't even rent to lesbians. I'm sure if I asked the neighbours around here if they would want lesbians living beside them, they wouldn't want them," according to a story published on March 5, 1975.
The assertion was even more surprising given that Good himself was once in a gay relationship. In July 1998, the landlord was shot by former lover George Carter in what a judge called "one of the most heartless, calculating, cold-blooded acts" he'd ever seen.
Carter confronted Good with a sawed-off shotgun outside his Mount Hope Street home and fired three rounds into him. The attack left Good maimed for life, and sent Carter to prison for 10 years.
In court, Carter explained it was a calculated revenge shooting after the former lovers, who met in a local gay bar, had a falling out. Carter felt he had been set up by Good for a drug conviction that cost him his $60,000-a-year job as a director of the Canadian Cancer Society in Waterloo.
The pair had a bitter rift that had stretched back years before the shooting. Good was convicted of public mischief in 1987 and given a year's probation for shouting obscenities at Carter while he worked at the Cancer Society's local offices.
Carter had been the society's district director for 14 years, until he was charged with trafficking and possession of cocaine, and fired in 1988. He was found guilty of selling drugs to an undercover RCMP officer and fined $1,000 in 1989 — even though the judge said Carter was the victim of a "scheme of revenge."
Judge Donald MacMillan said Carter might not have made the sale if not pressured by Good, his "vindictive" lover of four years.
At his attempted murder trial, Carter insisted he only meant to wound the landlord, but Good ended up in critical condition on life support in hospital. He lost his spleen and a kidney in the shooting.
It wasn't Good's first interaction with the courts. In 1989, he was charged with sexual exploitation of two boys, aged 15 and 16. The charges were later stayed by the assistant Crown attorney, who learned of "more pertinent" evidence after a preliminary hearing, according to a story in The Record on Jan. 12, 1990.
Last summer, Good's apartment complex at 154 Erb St. E. was back in the spotlight after the Electrical Safety Authority shut power to five units, citing safety concerns.
That prompted the City of Waterloo to issue an emergency order of its own, after tenants complained of mould and water from a leaky roof that damaged electrical outlets and wiring.
Tenants at another building owned by Good, at 112 Margaret Ave. in Kitchener, have also taken their complaints to the landlord and tenant board. They allege that Good allowed the property to fall into disrepair, and it became overrun with garbage, transients and rats.
Ten years ago, Good battled the City of Waterloo over whether he was running a lodging house at 12 George St., which allowed him to escape paying licence fees and avoid safety inspections.
People who have worked with Good say his pattern of behaviour as a landlord has always been hard to understand.
Hoffman, the property manager, said he watched Good neglect to collect thousands in rent owed to him. The landlord seemed fine, too, with operating rental properties that had few, if any, rent-paying tenants, he said.
"He made choices that were so bizarre," Hoffman said.
