More tenants upset with living conditions of Hamilton apartment building

The towers at 150 and 160 Hughson St. N in downtown Hamilton have problems that are plain to see.

Outside there’s graffiti, neglected repairs and in some cases trespassers breaking into cars and sometimes leaving behind human feces.

Inside is no better. There are signs of people living in the staircase with alcohol containers and drug paraphernalia left behind.

The only thing hard to find is a superintendent.

“Nothing! Nothing! I phone them, nothing happens,” says one tenant.

“They’re very slow on getting things fixed especially, if you’re an older tenant in this building,” says Randy Judei, a tenant of 150 Hughson St.

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These buildings are run by the same company Drake Property Management. So, who are they?

“So Drake as a property management company is just a by-product of their owners Lankin. They just buy up more properties in Hamilton,” says Hojay Byfield of Acorn Hamilton.

Hojay Byfield is a member of ACORN, a housing advocacy group in Hamilton.

He says Drake Property Management used to work with another company called Pulis Investment.

A search of that company takes you to its LinkedIn page, where the aforementioned “Lankin” he was speaking of can be found.

“Lankin, formerly Pulis, like I was saying, buy up these properties and leave it to property managements like Drake, to run,” Byfield says.

Looking through the Lankin Investments website, the Pulis connection that ties it all together can be found and connected to the company’s founder and CEO Kyle Pulis.

According to his own bio, he successfully has over $2 billion in assets under his management.

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CHCH News tried to reach out to the company to get a hold of him, but was told by one of its employees that it would be difficult.

And inquiries to the federal housing minister, would be answered by Monday.

“These financialized landlords, what are they in for?” says NDP Housing Critic Jenny Kwan.

They’re in it for making profits, they don’t care about their tenants and in fact, many of them, what they want to do is let the buildings run down and let the tenants out because once they force the tenants out, they can jack up their rents, because that’s how they increase their profit even greater,”

For the tenants who live at these properties, that profit comes at a cost.

Every broken lock, every night spent in fear, every hallway turned into a shelter.

Until someone holds the owners accountable, the people living here will keep paying the price.

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