The illegal occupants of a home at 246 Gilmour St. were preparing to barricade themselves in the building after being handed an eviction notice yesterday.
Hammers pounded nails and handsaws ripped through two-by-fours as the occupants tried to make the building friendly to its first residents in years.
But once the house's owner, Richard Davis, came by about 6 p.m. with the police and an eviction notice, the squatters knew they had to prepare.
"We're going to barricade ourselves inside and count on the community for support," said Amy Miller, a 21-year-old Carleton graduate.
"We've heard a strong rumour that they're going to come and evict us tonight," said 27-year-old Dan Sawyer, a lanky, quick-talking member of the crew that took over the three-storey downtown house Wednesday night.
That rumour explained the chicken wire on the upstairs windows -- "The police have a tendency to use tear gas, which is bad for the lungs," Mr. Sawyer said -- and the plywood barricade blocking off the back end of the house.
The old house, vacant at least seven years and maybe as many as 15, echoed with spirited repair work.
A bright orange copy of Home Improvement 1-2-3 sat atop a radiator on the top floor while squatters in studded black leather and army fatigue pants wrestled sheets of plywood up the narrow front stairs.
Rooms on the top floor had been set aside as men's and women's dorms, while food donated by neighbours and sympathizers -- cans of beans, loaves of bread, fruits and vegetables -- stocked one of its kitchens. A chemical toilet and a sack of sawdust served as bathroom facilities.
"People have been great," Mr. Sawyer said. "One guy just drove up and put about five cases of water down on the sidewalk."
As they set about fixing up the house, the squatters swept up the plaster dust left behind when some of the building's transient occupants decided to leave their marks by whacking out pieces of the walls.
They cut and installed supports to reinforce rotting balconies, partitioned off structurally unsound parts of the house and stripped wallpaper that was peeling off in strips from years of humidity and sun damage.
Yesterday, one young woman went around with a bottle of orange-scented cleanser, wiping years of grime off bookshelves and windowsills.
Much of the graffiti on the walls -- anti-capitalist slogans, little pro-anarchy poems, exhortations to act "NOW!" to fight injustice -- were the squatters' work too.
"As you can see, we've done some decorating too," he said.
"Government policies have had an unfair impact on the poor and the vulnerable," Mr. Sawyer said.
Mr. Sawyer traced the problem to the Chrétien government's deficit-fighting cut to provincial transfer payments, which "set the stage for the Harris Tories' cuts in social spending."
The result, according to the squatters: a 15,000-family waiting list for social housing in Ottawa. Federal plans to tear down dozens of unused houses at CFB Rockcliffe. A provincial Tenant Protection Act that protects rapacious landlords. So the activists decided to turn an unused building into affordable housing.
Wednesday night, 246 Gil-mour also made a convenient shelter for G8 activists who had come to Ottawa without securing a place to sleep.
"A lot of people have left now," Mr. Sawyer said. "We've got about 25 people working on the place."
The property legally belongs to Mr. Davis, an Ottawa resident. His parents bought it in 1958.
For many years, the big old house was used as an investment property with apartments: official records say three, the buzzers in the foyer suggest four.
Yesterday, Mr. Davis's wife, Jane Davis, said: "My husband never told them it was OK to be in the house."
Among the squatters' demands is a one-year "use it or lose it" rule that would see vacant buildings automatically turned into social housing.
Alex Munter, chairman of city council's social services committee and a fierce advocate for more publicly owned housing with rent linked to tenants' income, said he thought the activists' hearts were in the right place, but that a use-it-or-lose-it rule would be unworkable.
"It would mean a change in provincial law and the courts would pretty certainly throw it out right away," Mr. Munter said. "Expropriation is the last, worst option for bringing land into public ownership."
The city can take over buildings whose owners don't pay their property taxes -- Mr. Davis owes more than $10,500 on the building, according to the city -- but only if the bills have been in arrears for three years and an auction doesn't raise enough to cover them.
"A building like this, in a situation like this, I don't think the city would have any trouble recovering what it's owed," said Ottawa's chief tax collector, Ken Hughes.
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