[URBAN NOTE] "Finding a safe place to call home in Toronto after fleeing Hungary"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Wency Leung reports on the plight of refugees--here, a Hungarian teenager and his family--looking for a home in Toronto.

Upon arriving as asylum seekers, Laszlo [Sarkozi] and his family initially took up shelter at the Roycroft Motel, a drab place on noisy Kingston Road. But after several months of sharing a cramped room with his parents and two younger brothers, it was time to move on.

The Sarkozis, who were denied refugee status but were granted the right to stay on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, have called three places home in the five years they have been in Toronto, all of them in the eastern part of the city known as Scarborough. Laszlo, now 16, describes each:

The first apartment, it had bedbugs – the entire building. And just the general area was not very child-friendly. I remember walking to school once and there were drops of blood on the sidewalk, like someone had been stabbed. The police were called a couple of times for a few people who were always hanging out right beside the building. There was always a lot of screaming.

The second place [near Eglinton Avenue and Kingston Road] was much better. It was a townhouse. But the owners did not like us at all. We asked them to change the lock. They didn’t change the lock. We actually were living under the same lock as the previous people and they could have easily come in and opened the door any time. We asked them to fix the windows because they were not keeping cold air out properly. They didn’t. And when we asked them how much hydro would be, they said the bill should be $100, $150 every two months. No matter how much we conserved, it ended up being $1,000 or $1,500.