Not knowing whether you will have a roof over your head is something no one wants to face.
However, this is the reality for an increasing number of residents in downtown Vancouver, with several privately-owned single-room occupancy (SRO) buildings either being foreclosed or placed on the market.
The West Hotel is one of the SROs that advocates are most concerned about.
“Losing the privately-owned hotels is a crisis,” said Wendy Pederson, executive director of the Downtown Eastside SRO Collaborative Society.
“It’s going to impact not only the tenants but all of Vancouver.”
The collaborative says over the past few months, tenants have faced growing pressure from landlords looking to evict them.
“This displacement is unchecked and is causing harm and death in some cases,” said Ezra Bloom, who works in community outreach with SRO Collaborative.
“One of the tenants I spoke with regularly in the West, who had moved directly off the street, passed away last week in his room. He never really understood why he was being harassed and pressured.”
Roughly two-thirds of the West Hotel’s 98 rooms now sit vacant. With eight other SROs in the area in the process of being foreclosed, available rooms are quickly being outpaced by the number of people looking for a safe place to call home.
“If everybody that needs affordable housing is fighting over four units, it’s not going to work,” said SRO resident Misha Sample. “People that weren’t doing drugs are now on the streets, because they literally got kicked out of their homes. They have nowhere to rent; they feel hopeless.”
Pederson says while the province and city have taken important steps in recent years, including gaining the support of tenant-serving organizations and purchasing some buildings, if there isn’t a dedicated effort to further add to the affordable housing stock, those gains will go nowhere.
“We need governments to buy these buildings,” she said.
“We need an acquisition program, and we need emergency action to buy the buildings going into receivership. They are cheap. The time to buy is now.”
