RESIDENT DEFENDS WRECKING PARTY SPOT

Exasperated neighbours had been trying to get authorities to do something
about the garbage-strewn party house on their tiny dead-end street for the
past two months. This week, they took matters into their own hands.

Four of them kicked in the door at the Speed Street house around 6:30 p.m.
Sunday and announced to a startled tenant that "this is your moving day."
Then they tore the house apart.

By the time Victoria police arrived, water was pouring from ruptured
plumbing, doors had been torn off hinges, and all but a couple of the
windows in the two-storey house near Mayfair Shopping Centre had been
smashed. Holes were punched through inside walls and toilets torn out.

"We had to bring in B.C. Hydro, the fire department and public works just
to get a handle on things," says Victoria police Sgt. Del Manak.

Two of the neighbours who took part in the impromptu demolition are now
facing charges of breaking and entering, mischief and uttering threats. So
be it, says one of them, who thinks it's worth it if it ensures that the
landlord can't bring in any more troublesome tenants.

"The place was a crack house," says Rick Boudreau, a single parent who has
lived on Speed Street for three years.

"I know what I did was wrong, but it's the job of a parent to look after
their kid. That's what I was doing."

Boudreau says there has been a constant turnover of tenants at the house
for the past two years. But the real problems began two months ago when
rental manager Brian Cowan partitioned off some of the rooms to create
separate units for more tenants. Neighbours along the one-block street soon
found themselves patrolling for discarded needles on their lawns and
plagued by non-stop noise and traffic.

"We found eight people just in the basement when we finally went in there,"
says Boudreau, who works for Rockridge Demolition. "Something had to be
done. When I was growing up and we had people in our neighbourhood like
that, this is how we dealt with it."

Neighbours tried "hard, very hard, to get rid of this the proper way," says
Boudreau. They complained many times to Cowan and to the owner of the
house, Brian Martin, who owns two other houses on the same block and the
new Howard Johnson Harbourside Hotel on Elk Lake Drive. They complained to
the police and the City of Victoria.

But nothing changed and a few of the neighbours reached the conclusion that
it was up to them.

Neither Cowan nor Martin returned calls, but Martin's father Tom, who came
to survey the damage Monday after seeing a news item about it, says people
don't appreciate how difficult it is to evict people. The tenants had been
given one month's notice but hadn't left yet, says the senior Martin, who
used to own several rental houses on Speed Street.

It's no easy feat for police, either, when it comes to taking action
against people for activities inside their home, adds Manak.

"It's not just a matter of the neighbours telling us to go in," he says.

"We need to gather information sufficient enough to get a search warrant.
We need to build a case up and get the evidence."

The city has been to the house three times over the years in response to
complaints about everything from mounds of garbage to automotive parts
littering the yard, says Victoria bylaw enforcement officer Tim Weckand.
But city bylaws deal mostly with a home's appearance, says Weckand, not bad
tenants.

Chris McPherson, one of the few resident homeowners on the street, says
Speed Street has definitely had its ups and downs, including a period when
it was known as "the biker street."

Some of the 13 houses along the street have been left to deteriorate to the
point that only the most desperate tenants will rent them, he says,
something he blames on absent landlords who bought the houses as
investments and then lost interest when the area wasn't rezoned commercial
as they had expected.

But the house destroyed Sunday was the only "bad house" on the block at
this point, he notes: "We've got all sorts of characters on this street,
but the neighbourhood is actually pretty good right now."

And it's definitely better than it was two days ago, adds Boudreau, who has
no regrets about running off the tenants of 615 Speed St. "It's a message
to the landlords. If they won't clean it up, we will."

Government social workers arrived at Boudreau's home Monday afternoon,
apparently wondering whether a man who could tear up a house was safe to be
raising a seven-year-old. Boudreau, who hopes to clear things up at another
meeting today with the Children and Family Development Ministry, says he
did it to protect his daughter and would never cause her harm.

The house has since been boarded up, with nothing but overflowing garbage
bags, rusting shopping carts and a porchful of empty liquor bottles to
remind the neighbours of the problems they've been having.

"I don't mind paying the price for what happened," Boudreau says. "At least
I can go to work now knowing that my child is safe."