Protesters lament vanishing SRO hotels
Advocates fear loss of downtown residential buildings will cause wave of homelessness
One day before she has to move out of her mouldy sixth-floor unit at the dilapidated Balmoral Hotel, Roberta Westenberg is scrambling to find a roof over her head.
Residents of the notorious Downtown Eastside single-room occupancy hotel on the Hasting strip near Main have been ordered to leave by Monday, 10 days after the city deemed the building too dangerous and in threat of collapse.
“It’s not the perfect place to be, but there’s nowhere else for me to go,” said Westenberg, who has lived at the Balmoral for a year. She’s getting help from the city and provincial housing officials to find a place to stay, she said, and is hopeful she can find one before she ends up on the street.
The City of Vancouver said Sunday more than 140 units have been found for all registered residents of the Balmoral.
But advocates say there are more people living in the hotel that haven’t been accounted for. Wendy Pedersen of the Carnegie Community Action Project said a head count Saturday night found 28 residents who still don’t have housing.
On Sunday, more than 150 people gathered outside the Balmoral for a block party to protest what they called the city’s abandonment of its most vulnerable residents by failing to enforce bylaws to prevent the deterioration of the Balmoral and other SROs and to rally support for what they believe will just be the first battle of many.
“There are dozens of these hotels in this community that are on the edge of being condemned,” said Pedersen. She declined to name any of the buildings for fear the city will shut them down and risk leaving tenants homeless.
The city had said the Balmoral’s landlords, the Sahota family, will be ordered to begin repairs to the century-old building immediately. If it fails to do so, the city will go ahead with repairs and charge the costs to the landlords.
Pedersen is skeptical the landlords would fix the building, and said the city should do the repairs and send the bill to the Balmoral, or buy the building, as it had 22 others in a bid to protect Vancouver’s SRO-stock.
The city may have been able “to pull rabbits out of a hat at the last minute” and find new accommodations for most of the tenants, but unless the city gets moving, there will be more Balmorals in the future, she predicted.
Judy Graves, the city’s former homelessness advocate, has been working for years with tenants from the Sahota-owned SROs, which include the Regent across the street and the Cobalt on Main Street, and said conditions have gone from bad to worse.
“There’s been times when the city did enforce and we were able to get conditions up, but somehow the city has lost the will to enforce,” said Graves. “And when these hotels are allowed to deteriorate like this, we are causing homelessness.”