Renters with disabilities live in fear of eviction. Now, this man with PTSD sleeps in a shed
CBC
Sidney Wood says he was evicted last month because he couldn't pay his rent.
Wood, 41, couldn't afford the $1,620 per month for a basement apartment in Edmonton that he shared with his two teenage children. Not after after he and his wife separated in March, and not on his CPP disability income that he says is $1,403 per month.
So Wood, who is unable to work due to PTSD after 11 years as a correctional officer in a maximum security prison, had to move back to St. Theresa Point First Nation, an Oji-Cree reserve in Northern Manitoba. His children, who are 15 and 16, stayed in Edmonton with family.
Now, Wood sleeps in a makeshift shed on his father's property, because there are already eight people living in the three-bedroom house. The shed is about 180 square feet. But that's not the part that bothers him.
"I just miss my kids so much. That's what kills me," he told CBC News, weeping. "It's just one thing after another after another."
Wood reached out to CBC News because he wanted his story shared. He is one of the many people with disabilities who struggle to pay rent amid the rental housing crisis gripping the country.
With surging prices and decreased availability, finding housing has become daunting. Less than one per cent of rentals are both vacant and affordable for the majority of the country's renters, a recent CBC News analysis of more than 1,000 neighbourhoods across Canada's largest cities found.
That situation becomes more dire for Canadians with disabilities, who have a lower median income — about $35,700 in 2023, according to CBC's analysis of Statistics Canada data — but who are also more likely to live in rented dwellings than the total population.
"When governments talk about building affordable housing they rarely mean at the level of affordability that someone on disability benefits could afford," Gabrielle Peters, a disabled writer and policy analyst, told CBC News.
About eight million Canadians, or 27 per cent of the population, have a disability, according to a joint report released last month by the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) and Office of the Federal Housing Advocate (OFHA).
Disabilities can be physical, mental, intellectual, sensory, visible or invisible, and hinder a person's "full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others," according to the United Nations.
According to Stats Can data from 2017, people with disabilities were more likely to spend more than 30 per cent of their income on shelter costs, the benchmark for affordability set by the CMHC in 1986. And 44 per cent of renters with disabilities were estimated to be living in unaffordable situations, compared to 34.6 per cent of the total population.
Using the $35,700 median income, there are only around 2,800 bachelor or one-bedroom homes available and affordable across the 35 metropolitan areas CBC News analyzed. That's a small fraction of one per cent — 0.18 per cent — of all bachelor or one-bedroom rentals.
To find something larger would be nearly impossible. Less than one in 6,000 — or 0.015 per cent — of all two-bedroom rentals in the areas CBC analyzed were affordable on a median income for someone with a disability.