Decaying hotels temporary answer to social housing in Vancouver: experts

Despite the rats, roaches and clogged toilets at decaying rooming houses and hotels in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, activists and experts say they provide necessary affordable housing to the poorest people who would otherwise be pushed onto the streets.

The Balmoral Hotel recently became the focus of the housing crisis in the neighbourhood when the city issued an evacuation notice for about 143 tenants after it determined the building is at risk of collapse.

Vancouver’s bylaws define single room occupancy as hotels or rooming houses with non-market units of less than 320 square feet that typically come with shared bathrooms and don’t have a full kitchen.

There are 156 buildings with a total of 7,199 units that meet the categorization and 43 per cent are privately owned and managed. The rest are either owned or managed by nonprofits or the government.

Many of the buildings are more than 100 years old and were first established to house workers in forestry and mining, said Abi Bond, the city’s director of housing policy and projects.

Over the decades, low-income residents in need of affordable housing increasingly moved into the buildings and the city enacted a bylaw to preserve the buildings for that purpose.

Housing activist Wendy Pedersen said some tenants in the Balmoral have lived there for decades and most residents have a disability, mental-health issues or addictions. They have built a community and look out for each other, she added.

Single occupancy accommodations exist in cities around the world, but Bond said Vancouver’s system is unique and is typically compared with San Francisco.

Bond said the city has a policy to ultimately phase out the buildings in favour of social housing that has kitchens and bathrooms in each unit, but the process could take decades and requires funding from other levels of government.