The price of choosing safety

There is a question our community returns to, repeatedly, whenever an intimate partner harms a woman: why did she not just leave?

I want to answer that question. With what happened to me. I left. I followed the safety plan. I called 911 when the crisis prevention unit told me to. I cooperated with Children’s Aid, the Office of the Children’s Lawyer, victim services, and every government body in my path. I did everything right, and because I did everything right, because I chose my family’s safety over a rent payment in a home where we were no longer safe, I now have a Landlord and Tenant Board record that follows me everywhere I try to go.

One hundred and three rental applications. In eighteen months. All denied.

Not one of those landlords called to ask what happened. Not one looked past the LTB record to the T2 and T6 applications I filed in January of this year, applications that are still waiting for a hearing date as of this writing, applications that, if heard, would have told the full story and potentially nullified the outcome that is now haunting every application I submit. The backlog at the LTB is not a bureaucratic inconvenience. For survivors, it is a sentence.

What makes this injustice almost unbearable to explain is this: my income is verified. My references are powerful. The very homelessness navigation services and housing resource organizations that are actively supporting my applications (organizations that are, in some cases, prepared to pay my rent) are still watching me get turned down.

The system does not ask why the rent was not paid; it only asks that it was not.

My children. My 81-year-old mother. All of us with special needs. Three months of shelters that could not accommodate us, of applications denied before anyone ever met us, of watching my family absorb a crisis that was not of our making. This is what it costs to leave. This is the answer to “Why don’t they just go?”

Going can make you homeless, and homelessness, in this city’s rental market, can become permanent.

So, I want to try something. I am calling on landlords and property managers across the GTA who want to be named as allies. If you are willing to look beyond an LTB record and assess a survivor’s application based on verified income, references, and context, if you believe a woman who chose her family’s safety over her rental history deserves a home, I want to know about you. More importantly, our community needs to know about you.

I am building a directory. A public, searchable list of housing allies for survivors of intimate partner violence and violence against women. Your name listed there is not charity. It is a declaration that you understand what safety costs, and that you refuse to make women pay for it twice.

To be listed, reach out: creative@astoldbyanya.com. The question is why leaving means losing everything.