She hands me a Mason jar of brownish, liquefying things. Only by their warts are they recognizable for what they once were: pickles. Next comes a jar of beets gone crusty black, and another the contents of which gave up the ghost long ago. Now the cans. New England clam chowder, with a best before date of April, 2007. Others less recent. “Garbage, right?” I ask. Again, Angie Ferri goes over the ground rules. Expired edibles are, without question, garbage. Anything else gets tossed only with permission from Paul. So when I sift through the six cardboard boxes and three recycling bins that fill his tiny kitchen, every excavation – Wetnaps, yellowed Herman cartoons, back issues of Toronto Life, unopened junk mail, unopened personal mail, paper napkins, photo mags, unused envelopes of all sizes – receives a cryptologist’s scrutiny, a cleric’s devotion. Photo of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. “That’s an amazing shot,” says Paul. Niagara winery brochures. “I’ll sort those later.” From the kitchen, Ferri shoots me a knowing look. Hoarders famously delay divestment. The physical removal of items is nothing compared to the painful process of decision: what to keep and what to throw out. Herself a recovering hoarder, Ferri’s been clean, literally, for ten years. In 2008, she and friend Jim Altibello started Earthsafe Canada, an extreme cleaning outfit originally focused on the city’s bedbug problem. Their first hoarding case was in 2009; they had five the following year, and seven so far in 2011. Their rates are flexible, dependent not only on the size of the job, but the depth. She’ll charge Paul $2,000 to help him work through multiple layers of disarray. Paul stands just outside the kitchen. Stooped, bespectacled, the 77-year-old Canada Post retiree still wears the colours. In the closet behind him, I count six official coats. But I don’t stare for long because that’s another rule: No snooping in closets, cupboards, drawers. Paul copes pretty well with the first round of cleaning. His smile is wide and, once he gets comfortable with his visitors, frequent. “Hey,” he says, pulling a sheaf of dirty jokes from the morass of paper on his desk. “Why are men like tiles?” In the kitchen, we finally hit bare floor. “Because if you lay them properly the first time, you can walk all over them forever.” For thirty years, Paul’s lived in this midtown apartment, steadily accumulating. Five hundred and fifty musty and stuffed square feet. Living room dust, long undisturbed, lays upon Mahler records, mystery novels, small stone sculptures. A 105-pound Bernese Mountain Dog named Pawlin wanders out of the bedroom and into an avalanche of paper. Paul sits down. I hand him a can of Volkswagen Heavy Duty Brake Fluid. He hefts it. “I haven’t driven a Volkswagen in 35 years.” Pawlin, rheumy-eyed and mild-mannered, stretches out by the bedroom door. This could take a while. The Centre for Equality Rights in Accommodation, a tiny non-profit operation just north of Kensington Market, receives nearly one hundred eviction calls each month. The majority of these are for rental arrears, down-on-their-luck tenants who need advice and referrals to help pay what they owe and keep their homes. Lately though, we’ve seen an uptick in hoarding cases. In my first four years on the eviction prevention desk, I helped one hoarder. I’m working on five this month alone. The numbers are up because of what went down last September. Tenant Stephen Vassilev lived among highly-combustible clutter, a mess of law books and legal documents that caught fire in his 24th-floor apartment, blazed through the public housing slab at 200 Wellesley Street East, and set off alarm bells that ring still to this day: 1,200 evacuees, untold millions in building repair and tenant compensation packages, plus the likelihood of another $80 million more because of a class action lawsuit brought against Toronto Community Housing Corporation and their property management partner, Greenwin. All over the city, landlords have become more adamant about apartment inspections. Visits from Toronto Fire Service and Toronto Public Health are more frequent. Anyone deemed to possess “excessive belongings” gets slapped with an N5, notice that they are accused of “willful or negligent damage” to the property and have interfered with the “reasonable enjoyment” of others. Clean-up is ordered to begin within two to three weeks; if not, the tenant faces a possible eviction hearing at the presiding body, the Landlord Tenant Board. While it’s true that most property managers have enough understanding to be soft on these deadlines, it’s equally true that the second a tenant holds an N5, they can hear the clock ticking. “Something set these people off, some kind of traumatic event,” says Andrea Perry, an occupational therapist in community mental health. Hoarders retreat from the world, hiding themselves behind a phalanx of possessions. Every item has deep emotional significance. “We need to be very patient with them. We can’t bulldoze our way through.” Hoarding, long considered akin to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, is strangely resistant to typical OCD treatments. “The success rate for cognitive therapy and anti-anxiety medication is really minimal. It’s a hugely perplexing problem and we just don’t have enough knowledge.” Here’s what we do know: hoarders tend to be private, isolated people. They rarely seek help, either because they don’t recognize their problem or cannot face it. Estimates that 5 per cent of the population is affected are likely low; and since the majority of them are seniors, we’ll continue to see a spike in the numbers as the population turns grey. In Regent Park, where outdated public housing awaits the boom of demolition, I stand among smaller, odder architecture. A shadeless lamp teeters on a leather suitcase which balances on a limp carton that sits in a laundry basket. Leaning towers all around, slumping pyramids of stuff. Maria shows me rotary phones, Barbie dolls, teapots. Her two-floor, three-bedroom apartment is packed. “I used to run to the dollar store and buy things whenever my life got too stressful,” says the 62-year old Guatemalan native. She’s had plenty of stress. One daughter deceased, another crippled by cancer, and a son currently in jail. Despite such trauma, Maria maintains a sly humour. While carefully unpacking the artifacts of her life – the complete Knight Rider series, on VHS, unwatched – she looks at me with warm, crinkly eyes. “Maybe insane.” Angie Ferri laughs. She’s three weeks into what will becomea four-month job. Toronto Public Health is picking up the $3,400 tab for this job, but the women are doing all the heavy lifting. Furniture is slowly unburied, open spaces are visible on the floor. What’s more, Maria has developed a good grasp on her problem. She now takes long walks to help curb her compulsive spending and is forthright about her 30-year affliction. “Getting them to open up is a huge step,” says Ferri. “What you see in our homes is really what’s in our heads. We’re a mess. Is it any wonder we don’t like to let anyone in?” Pop culture, of all things, is helping to open doors. The story of the Collyer brothers, hermitic Manhattanites who lived and died amid an astonishing array of detritus, has already been the basis for a movie by Diane Keaton and a novel by E.L. Doctorow. The wild popularity of reality shows on A&E and TLC has further increased awareness. Even the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is getting into the act; according to a recent article in the National Post, a section on this compulsive problem might make the next edition. Hoarding has never been hotter. So what should this cultural currency buy? Time. Time not just for wider general acceptance nor for greater understanding by experts, but time for the hoarders themselves. Under the threat of eviction, they have no choice but to face disorder. We’re a mess. This is the sad, courageous truth: these are people forced to tidy up their inner and outer worlds, to learn how to hold on to some parts of their troubled biographies and how to let go of others.
