Neighbours fed up with neglect of Jamesville housing property in Hamilton

Neighbours are raising concerns about the property maintenance at the former affordable housing complex – Jamesville – in Hamilton’s north end.

At the property there is a hole in the fencing, graffiti, and an explosion of vegetation, all of which has neighbours fed up.

But there remains a larger issue here, of how the site is being neglected and how such a vast property can sit unused for so long, during a housing crisis.

“The neighbours are fed up,” said Corinne Taylor, one of the said neighbours of the property. “There’s crime going on in there, there’s people living in the houses, there’s been fires, there’s been graffiti – it’s just not what we want to look at anymore.”

In 2015, the city began relocating the tenants of Jamesville with plans to redevelop the site into a mixed-income community.

Those plans, however, never got off the ground – stalled by years of legal battles leaving the property to fall into disarray.

A fact that Hamilton City Housing did not shy away from, saying in a statement released Thursday, “we have not done a good job of taking care of the property and will do a better job moving forward.”

It maintains that the site’s demolition continues to be delayed, due to a zoning bylaw amendment that CN Rail is trying to appeal.

“We’ve been waiting for the Jamesville property to – something – to happen, because we plan on purchasing this from my parents, but my family and I are now thinking ‘are we going to leave the neighbourhood’?,” said Taylor.

“It’s really bad, because even the houses have lost value,” said Marei Pinto, another neighbour. “Even sometimes, you hear at night the animals, the people – they go in there and it’s really bad for our neighbourhood to be like that.”

While the city moved the former tenants out nearly a decade ago, the homes never really emptied out.

“Oh, there’s lots of people, lot’s of ’em,” said Kevin Forrest, who sleeps in Jamesville at night.

Forrest has been on the street for eight years and for the last eight months he said he’s been staying inside the former Jamesville site whenever he can.

“Well, it was the only spot around, so I took it, but they keep kicking me out everyday,” said Forrest.

The city cleared these homes to make way for a solution to the housing crisis.

Instead, they have become a symbol of it.

However fixing that problem, advocates say, will take more than just the municipal government.

“The municipality really can’t afford, without a substantial increase in people’s taxes, putting their risk of housing in jeopardy, to build the kind of sustained shelter and affordable housing that we need,” said Karl Andrus, the executive director of the Hamilton Community Benefits Network.

“There’s been a real effort, by this term of council across all political stripes, to address it, but they cannot do it without the support of other levels of government that have better ways of raising funds, other than raising taxes,” said Andrus.

The storied history of Jamesville is enough to make heads spin.

Hamilton Ward 2 Councillor Cameron Kroetsch told CHCH News that a crew is expected to be on site to clean up the property and make repairs Friday and Monday.

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