FILTH, LOATHING IN SROS
Housing advocate Wendy Pedersen stands in a fire escape stairwell at the single room occupancy Balmoral Hotel in the Downtown Eastside, where residents live in appalling conditions. But there was a time when things weren’t so bad in such dwellings.
Inside the Regent Hotel on East Hastings Street, on the wide wooden staircase between the fourth and fifth floor, a man lies weeping.
His shirt is dragged up over his head, his few belongings are scattered nearby: a crumpled garbage bag, a baseball cap, empty blue water packs for injecting, wrappers from alcohol swabs and a prickly nest of used needles. The stair is spattered with blood.
A woman at his feet stands up and waves a journal she’s been writing in.
“He’s crying. It’s a normal human emotion.”
She sinks back to the floor and says, “Leave him alone.”
The deep, hard sound of the man’s weeping is drowned out by shouting at the other end of the hall: “I’m vomiting. I’m vomiting.”
A young woman in pink terry cloth shorts careens around the corner, grabbing the wall for balance. She shoves her head into a plastic jug, hurls, staggers to the bathroom, looks in and staggers away again.
In the shared bathroom, the toilet is clogged to the brim with feces and a patchwork of used needles. Unusable. The floor is littered with needles, broken tiles, crumbled plaster, garbage. The sink and tubs have no taps.
An older man steps out of a room, gives a cool warning: “Hope you have gloves. There’s cellulitis everywhere in here.”
Judy Graves, a longtime advocate on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, quietly snaps photos and points out the endless list of health and safety violations: blocked fire escapes, overloaded sockets, used needles, extension cords crisscrossing hallways, snarled fire hoses — the whole thing a nightmarishly entangled Gordian knot. Her question is the sword. “Is building luxury condos the only viable industry left in B.C.? And why is the benefit from development not going to solve the housing problem in B.C.?”
Graves has worked for years, both for the city and as an advocate, trying to help the hard-tohouse, including residents of the DTES. Graves, who is retired, cites 1983 and the run-up to Expo 86 as a turning point for the increase in homelessness in Vancouver. Rooming houses all over the city were demolished: Kitsilano, Commercial Drive and False Creek Slopes all lost buildings. Residents were funnelled into the DTES.
“Everything was disappearing and not being replaced,” Graves says. “Until then there was sufficient rooming house stock in the city and pretty much everyone lived inside.”
In the mid-1990s the city developed a program called NIST, or Neighbourhood Integrated Service Team. The city worked with citizens and dedicated employees from fire, police, health, planning, library, engineering, permits and licences, and social planning agencies to cover 15 areas of the city and find solutions. NIST won a United Nations award for innovation in public service.
“Working together, pressure could be brought to bear on bad hotels,” says Graves, who worked for the city on behalf of tenants. “It was remarkably effective. We brought the hotels on the DTES from unlivable conditions to acceptable conditions inside of about three years.”
The program was eventually disbanded, for reasons Graves says were never fully explained. As enforcement and inspection fell into separate silos, conditions deteriorated.
“Until we properly house everybody, until we take care of this, every gentrification, every new development in the city is just a further cruelty,” Graves says.
NOWHERE TO GO
Inside the Balmoral Hotel on Hastings, Larren, a 39-year-old displaced forestry worker who says he is half-First Nations, has been evicted for reasons he doesn’t fully understand. His belongings are in the hallway.
In his empty room, a broken sink sits on the floor. Unable to get management to repair it, he attached a hose as a makeshift drain and continued to use it on the floor.
Patches of toxic black mould cover the walls. Paint peels off the ceiling.
“I couldn’t breathe anymore,” he says. The brutal conditions have contributed to a downward spiral.
“I’ve lived with depression and anxiety for a long time,” says Larren, who also struggles with drug addiction. “But to live like this, it’s impossible to get better.”
In the room, he leaves behind a shrine to love and hope. He doodled the walls with four-leaf clovers, sunsets and mountain tops, hearts, a girlfriend’s name, Sonya, and this promise: We Will Live The Dream.
Larren has nowhere to go. He might end up at the Regent with his girlfriend, he says, but adds, “She’s really addicted. It won’t be good.” He might end up on the streets. The hallway where his belongings are stacked is littered with garbage and needles. A few doors down, a pair of feet stick out from behind a door, corpse-like.
INACTION FOR YEARS
Corpses are a continuing problem, says Sam Dharmapala, a former front line employee who recalls regularly finding dead bodies during his nine years working at the Balmoral and Regent.
“You could only find them by the smell.”
He says the rooms, complete with blood and fluids from decomposition, were cleaned with the same mop used to do the hallways.
“No biohazard cleanup afterward,” he says.
Dharmapala says in 2010, a meth lab was found in Room 305 at the Balmoral.
“Every city meeting they would ask, where’s the report on the cleanup in Room 305?” Dharmapala says. “Seven years and it still hasn’t been done. Why does the city keep asking?”
The City of Vancouver confirmed there was a meth lab at the hotel, and the room remains unrented.
“The owner applied for a special inspections permit in June 2016 but has not arranged for the inspection. The City requires the owner have an environmental report completed by a professional before the City enters the room,” City of Vancouver spokesperson Jag Sandhu stated in an email.
Both the Balmoral and Regent hotels are owned by Triville Enterprises, a real estate holding company worth more than $130 million according to B.C. Assessment, which names Parkash Sahota, 89, as director and her siblings Pal, 77, and Gudyal, 79, as members. When reached by phone twice for comment on this story, Gudyal Sahota hung up on Postmedia. The Sahota family’s lawyer, Michael Katzalay, didn’t return calls.
Nine years ago, Dharmapala, then a recent immigrant, landed a job with the Sahotas as a bookkeeper. He worked in the cage by the front door of the Balmoral and Regent hotels. In an affidavit for a classaction lawsuit against the Sahotas before the Supreme Court of B.C., Dharmapala says the Sahotas encouraged employees to physically intimidate tenants. The inhumane conditions overwhelmed him.
“People fighting, doing drugs, buying drugs outside, inside, eviction notices. Why is this happening? I had the picture of Canada as a nice, rich country.”
He saw police had no way of dealing with the criminal activities in the hotels.
“I asked a sergeant why they let people do whatever they want here. He said, ‘Welcome to Canada,’ ” says Dharmapala, shaking his head.
Dharmapala had knowledge and access to the Sahotas’ financial dealings related to the Regent and Balmoral, and has detailed some of them in the affidavit. He said he represented the Sahotas at regular meetings with city enforcement officials. He says conversations between the city and the hotel owners about health and safety infractions were “a waste of time.”
Last June, when a structural beam collapsed in the basement of the Balmoral Hotel, Dharmapala reached his breaking point. He informed the owner the situation was putting tenants in danger. When the owner tried to do repairs without a professional contractor, Dharmapala and longtime DTES housing advocate Wendy Pedersen blew the whistle to city officials. Concerned the building would collapse, the city moved quickly to get an engineering firm to do the work. Dharmapala said he was fired. For Pedersen, it’s hard to believe the years of inaction on singleroom occupancy housing (SRO) is not related to what pumps this city’s economy: real estate. Let things get bad enough and an earthquake, a fire or a health crisis will take out the problem, she says.
“The developers are controlling the neighbourhood. This means pushing out the poor. It seems like the city and the province’s hands are tied. There is no political will.”
Over the years, B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Branch has made decisions on the side of SRO tenants, but the decisions brought little change as the city was unable to force landlords to comply.
Pedersen decided the only recourse was legal action. In 2016, she connected tenants with lawyer Jason Gratl, who filed a class-action lawsuit in the name of Regent Hotel tenant Jack Gates against the Sahota family, and a civil claim against the City of Vancouver seeking compensation and secure enforcement of repair orders.
“My client strongly disputes that the City of Vancouver lacks the legal power to enforce its bylaws,” Gratl says. “What it really lacks is the political will. That’s a problem of the elected council, the mayor and the deputy mayor.”
Gratl has applied for court orders against mass evictions, asked to have tenants’ rent money held in escrow and to have a non-profit society take over management of the Regent as the case moves through the courts.
Although B.C. Supreme Court Justice Heather MacNaughton ruled her court would hear the case, the Sahotas filed an appeal in March, arguing the court does not have jurisdiction over residential tenancy issues. This week, the Court of Appeal announced it will expedite the case and hear the appeal June 8.
“If we succeed on the appeal, the jurisdiction for bringing class actions for things like inadequate elevator service, or bedbugs, or leaky roofs, in respect of deficiencies, will be clear,” Gratl said. Pedersen is more blunt.
“If we win, it’s open season” on problem landlords.
Pedersen strongly believes the city and province should do more. In 2007, B.C. Housing bought 20 SROs, one fifth of the SRO housing stock in the DTES. Fourteen of them, including the Sunrise, Washington and Roosevelt, she says, are now “stunning examples of the transformation that is possible for people when they have good housing in their lives.”
She sees a ray of hope in Kaye Krishna, who joined the city as general manager of development, buildings and licensing in August.
Krishna is from New York, where she worked on affordable housing with the city government. She’s used to dealing with challenging landlords and helping vulnerable, low-income residents.
Krishna says she has visited the DTES SROs many times and she is forthright in answering questions.
“What we are looking at is how we can be much more proactive with our enforcement, particularly with our at-risk buildings, at-risk populations with low quality of life.”
The city is launching a study to evaluate the tools available within the legal and regulatory framework.
“What can we do? Are we doing everything we can do? And what else do you think we can do?” Krishna says.
Krishna says the city will also be considering whether they need to ask the province for additional power or support, and will be looking at other cities for best practices and enforcement models for challenging landlords.
“Currently, for example, when we write an order on a building, it doesn’t matter if it’s a doorknob missing or the toilet’s off its basin and is sitting in the hallway, the owner has 60 days to comply and to fix it. There is not much we can do within 60 days.” Krishna says. “We would much prefer to do those fixes faster, but we can’t do that now.”
Krishna said in the fall, the city identified 10 priority buildings and stepped up enforcement. Six of those buildings have “improved significantly” since that time.
“The two that were on the list, that were the worst and remain the worst, were the Balmoral and the Regent,” Krishna says.
Krishna said the city has an integrated enforcement team working with the owners to deal with issues at the Balmoral and Regent.
“In our opinion, the buildings are out of control,” Krishna says.
Krishna says resources are a problem.
“In San Francisco, New York, there is an enormous amount of additional funding at the federal level and the state level. There are more services and more capital available. It’s part of the reason New York was able to get out of SROs and get people into supportive housing.”
She would not comment on the class action lawsuit.
HUMOUR AMONG CHAOS
Although there is blood on the walls, blood on the floor, rats, needles, despair, disrepair and unimaginable agony on every floor, there is also life, and humour, and people like Terry.
Terry was homeless for years, and says he is just happy to have a place to call home. He works for United We Can, and gets most of his meals from Dumpsters or shelters because he pays $450 of his meagre $610 welfare allowance for his room.
Terry says, “It’s better than sleeping on the streets.”
Terry has picked up some beer after work, and this morning he is relaxing on the hallway steps near his room. Down at the south end of the hallway, the fire escape door is open.
Sunlight sparkles in the distance, dances across the Telus World of Science globe, the towers of Olympic Village and a trio of condos that seem to be standing sentry, looking straight at the Regent, like soldiers waiting to claim their territory.
People fighting, doing drugs … Why is this happening? I had the picture of Canada as a nice, rich country.