Rancid hotdogs, urine puddles among repeated complaints about for-profit homeless shelters

Sour-tasting hotdogs. Pizza Pockets and rotten eggs for breakfast. Locked laundry rooms. Puddles of urine on the floor.

All are among the complaints made to the Newfoundland and Labrador Housing Corporation in the last three years from tenants of the province's for-profit shelter system: a smattering of rooming houses in St. John's owned and operated by four companies.

The owners of the rooming houses — six of them in total — are paid on a nightly basis to provide tenants with bedding, household items, working appliances and three meals a day.

But documents obtained by CBC News through access to information legislation show clients repeatedly complaining about a lack of food, broken windows and doors, and sanitation, painting a picture of an emergency housing system that leaves the city's most vulnerable choosing between homelessness and, at its worst, life-threatening danger.

In the emails provided to CBC, one shelter client said they were unable to attend work for three days because they couldn't access the laundry room to clean their clothes.

In another case, a non-profit worker observed "mice running around" and a smoke detector that seemed "to be broken and in pieces," and urged N.L. Housing to find the affected client a bed in a non-profit shelter. 

Another government worker told N.L. Housing that a client was provided with so little food they had been sleeping as much as possible to avoid hunger pangs — a complaint the worker said she'd heard regularly over the years.

A client who was served "sour" hotdogs for supper told N.L. Housing that they were too afraid to tell the shelter operator about the spoiled food for fear of being kicked out into the street. Others said they were given Pizza Pockets for breakfast, and one person said an egg sandwich they'd been provided was "green."

The complaints about food and hygiene surface repeatedly in the emails to N.L. Housing from 2019 to the present.

Some of the complaints also conveyed serious safety concerns.

A mother and her baby, staying in one room in January, fled the shelter after feeling unsafe with two male tenants outside their bedroom door. When she returned a few days later, she found the two men in her room, with her belongings still inside. 

Another complained of being attacked with a syringe, and an email to N.L. Housing noted police had visited the residence three times in under a week.

Late last year, the alleged threats of violence occurring at these shelters culminated in death.

On Dec. 27, a 42-year-old woman staying at a private shelter on Cookstown Road was allegedly killed by another tenant.