After fighting for repairs for almost 10 years, this Halifax tenant says the system is broken

Karen Crane's top-floor apartment is neatly furnished with a breathtaking view — but her living room looks like a construction site. 

Crane's couches are covered with drop cloths and the floorboards have been pulled up throughout the living room, revealing the concrete slab. Under her patio door, a swath of drywall has been removed, exposing concrete, metal shards and protruding nails.

She says the unit has been in this condition for months, and issues have been recurring for years.

"I am an educated person … I'm a woman who has some resilience," Crane, 62, said in an interview. "But I'm broken down a little bit here, you know, I'm fading."

Crane, a registered nurse, said shortly after she moved into her apartment on Walter Havill Drive in Halifax's Armdale neighbourhood in the fall of 2015, she began noticing the heat wasn't working and sometimes the floor near the patio door was wet.

Then came full-blown flooding that covered the living room floor on multiple occasions. 

Almost a decade later, the flooding issue hasn't been fixed, she said, despite an order in her favour from the province's residential tenancies program, and an order from a municipal building official for repairs to be completed by the end of April. 

Crane said she feels the government systems aren't working.

"I don't think it's meant to be that way, but there seems to be holes that need to be tightened up," she said. 

Nora MacIntosh, a staff lawyer with Nova Scotia Legal Aid in Halifax, says her office hears from tenants "very regularly" who struggle to get repairs completed in their rentals. 

"The frustrating part is that a lot of the time the advice that we can give doesn't feel very great, because there aren't very many options that people can access to get repairs completed," MacIntosh told CBC News in an interview. 

MacIntosh voiced concerns that have been long held by both tenants and landlords that the residential tenancy system lacks enforcement capabilities. 

Meanwhile, the head of the residential tenancies program insists there is a way to enforce repairs — it just may not be well known. 

Crane said over the years, her landlord, Navid Saberi of United Gulf Developments Ltd., sent different people in to assess the flooding and heat issues and try to fix them, but nothing worked for long.