Affordable housing just a dream for many Essex County residents

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Like many young adults, Jeremy Bezaire, a Harrow native, can only dream of finding his own place to live due to the rising cost of housing.

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The realities of a hot housing market, rising rental costs and a long list of access to affordable housing units are now affecting residents of Essex County, where prices were traditionally lower.

Bezaire, a 22-year-old college graduate with a full-time job at a plumbing wholesaler in Windsor, can’t afford to live alone.

Earning $ 18 an hour just isn’t enough to pay rent, plus a car and food, Bezaire said.

Two years ago, she applied for income-adapted housing, waiting for a rent-subsidized apartment in Kingsville, Harrow or Amherstburg so she could be close to her parents’ home in Harrow, where she currently resides.

“Right now I have to live with my parents,” Bezaire said. “It would be nice to be able to get to a place that could pay to not have to depend on someone else.

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“I just don’t know how our generation will do it.”

Mom Dawn Bezaire said her son is “essentially a poor worker and cannot afford to live independently.

“It will never be able to survive outside of our home,” Dawn said. “She may live with us forever because… she has to have a car that she has to pay for… besides, there is no affordable housing.

“When my husband and I were together for the first time, we were able to have affordable housing in an apartment building. Now it seems like they’re just building really expensive condos or really high mortgages, you know, $ 400,000 start-up homes. “

Essex Coun. Sherry Bondy said she gets three to four inquiries a week about affordable housing.

“I am now in my twelfth year on the council and I would say I have not received as many complaints as I have recently, in the last year and a half,” Bondy said. “They are not necessarily complaints, they are inquiries about housing.

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“It’s not even age specific. It’s from the 23-year-old son who wants to move out of his parents’ basement to the 65-year-old single older woman who can’t find a home, ”he said.

“I would say that definitely in the last year, maybe even more, it has reached crisis levels where I don’t even have an answer for the people. I don’t even have a clue. “

A recent demonstration in Harrow drew attention to the dilemma many face.

It was organized after the city notified a man who had been living in his car of a statute violation. The notice said he had to stop ditching his car on the side of a highway or he would be fined on November 2.

He moved the car and a housing unit was found at Ell-Roy Manor, an affordable housing complex, in Harrow for him.

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“I understand what the city had to do,” Bondy said. “You cannot live indefinitely on the side of the road in your car. Nobody wants to see someone living in a car. No one should have to live in a car. “

Bondy said affordable and affordable housing is basically no more.

“What I experienced recently with the homeless is that it is not just a Windsor problem. It is also a county problem, ”he said.

Bondy said a housing unit was found because an advocate worked on the man’s behalf.

“We need the same kind of advocacy with affordable housing because city councils like sexy things. We like multi-million dollar condos. We like all things fancy. And also the developers. “

He said city councils need to have serious conversations about “who, what, why, when, how can we make this type of housing, you know, more affordable and affordable.

“We all have a responsibility here,” Bondy said. “We all have a responsibility and that includes making tenants good tenants.”

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