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Ouellette Manor: “This is our home”

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Sometimes, adversity crushes people. It lit a fire under Cathy Nantais.

Nantais lives at 920 Ouellette Avenue, Windsor’s infamous public housing highrise. She’s the co-ordinator of the new Neighbourhood Watch there, the first in an apartment building. She’s tough, tenacious and sometimes, she admits, a bit salty. But she cares, fiercely. When fearful residents hid in their apartments, Nantais stuck her neck out to do something about the rowdiness and the crime. This is her home, she says, and she wants it back.

Nantais wants to be positive, but it was bad, she admits. Drug addicts rode the elevators, going to buy their stuff. Prostitutes accosted old men. Drunks staggered along the hallways. There were rowdy parties. Garbage and cigarette butts were strewn about. There was a stabbing, fires, bedbugs. Two suspects in a vicious hate-crime burst through an elderly woman’s apartment to escape from police. Mayor Eddie Francis announced last year the city was going to clean up the building. Five months later, 146 dead cats were found stuffed in fridges and freezers in two apartments.

Older tenants and those who don’t speak English were afraid. They hid in their apartments. Even Nantais was apprehensive. Her grown daughters refused to come into the building any more. They’d meet her in the parking lot.

And it was dreadful reading the stories about their building in the media.

“This is our home,” said Nantais.

Nantais started calling the Windsor Essex Community Housing Corporation about the problems. When she saw a lot of people going in and out of certain apartments late at night, she complained. Surely to God there’s something you can do to stop this, she’d say. Tenants began coming to her with problems. Go tell Cathy, people started to advise each other. There was no tenants group, so she became the tenants group. Then she and another tenant started a safety and security committee.

Cathy Nantais speaks during the unveiling of a new neighbourhood watch program in the Ouellette Manor building in Windsor, Ont. on Tuesday, March 19, 2013.                         (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)

Cathy Nantais speaks during the unveiling of a new neighbourhood watch program in the Ouellette Manor building in Windsor, Ont. on Tuesday, March 19, 2013. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)

Ouellette Manor is for people age 50 or older. “When you get older, you want peace in your life,” says Nantais, who is 63. “You don’t have to live with that. There are ways to stop that.”

But one by one, the members of the safety and security committee, frustrated with the lack of progress, quit or moved. Not Nantais. She called the CHC. She sent all kinds of emails about everything.

“I’m sure when the phone rang, they said, ‘Oh no, not her again,’” she said, laughing.

Now, she joked, “they’ve got me on speed dial.”

It’s not far from the truth.

“She’s got my ear,” says Inspector Bob Labute of  Windsor police, tasked with cleaning up 920 Ouellette.

Now Nantais is busy telling residents about Neighbourhood Watch, urging them to come to meetings, recruiting volunteers.

In this file photo, Cathy Nantais, chair of the safety and security committee at 920 Ouellette Manor in Windsor, Ont. speaks Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2012, about some of the problems in the highrise apartment building. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)

In this file photo, Cathy Nantais, chair of the safety and security committee at 920 Ouellette Manor in Windsor, Ont. speaks Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2012, about some of the problems in the highrise apartment building. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)

She’s optimistic.

“A lot of tenants are starting to understand what has to happen before things get better,” she said.

And things are getting better, she says. This isn’t the Taj Mahal. There are still drugs, but not out in the open. There are fewer noise complaints, less disorderly conduct and less garbage in the halls and elevators. More residents are coming out for coffee hour. They’re talking to each other.

“When people say the people in this building are lowlifes, they are very mistaken,” said Nantais. “There are a lot of people who had good lives, but unfortunately, something happened to change that.”

Nantais spent much of her childhood in the care of the Children’s Aid Society and foster parents. She left school in Grade 10, before she was expelled. She had her first child at 17.

For a fleeting 12 years, she lived a good life with the father of her second child. She worked at his business. They lived in a new house with a pool, drove a Cadillac, had a housekeeper and travelled to Florida, Aruba, Hawaii.

But it was a troubled relationship. Finally, Nantais left. And there she was: a single parent with two kids, no job, no child support and little education. She spent the next four decades at odd jobs from waitress, to cashier to filling in on the line in factories.

“Now what have I got?” she said. “You could fit my whole apartment in my (former) living room.”

“Oh well,” she said, sighing and throwing up her hands.

Cheryl Taggart of the University of Windsor’s social work school, who works with the residents of Ouellette Manor, marvels at Nantais’ optimism, her perseverance and her resilience.

“She just did not let it rest,” she said. “She kept going back and going back and going back.”

Said Labute, “She stands for the good of the people of the building. She really wants to turn that building into a nice neighbourhood again. And she’s willing to lead the charge. That should be commended.”

ajarvis@windsorstar.com or 255-5587 or on Twitter @winstarjarvis.

Exterior of 920 Ouellette Manor in Windsor, Ont. is shown Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2012. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)

Exterior of 920 Ouellette Manor in Windsor, Ont. is shown Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2012. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)

 

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