What good is an unused bylaw? Ask the mayor
It was an option Gregor Robertson seemed to love as a candidate. But as mayor, he’d never seen it in action.
When the City of Vancouver announced in June that the Balmoral Hotel would be evacuated because the rundown building posed an imminent danger to residents, city officials delivered a stern-sounding warning: the owners, the Sahota family, must complete necessary repairs, or the city would get the work done themselves and bill the Sahotas. It wasn’t a new idea.
In October 2008, when Robertson was running for mayor, city hall’s use — or disuse — of the standards of maintenance bylaw on the Downtown Eastside’s rundown residential hotels was “becoming a point of contention in the municipal election,” The Vancouver Sun reported, adding: “Robertson and the Vision Vancouver/COPE slate are touting the legislation as a way for the city to force slumlords to keep their buildings up to snuff before they become so bad they’re condemned.”
Two weeks later, Robertson won his first of three mayoral elections, and three months into his first term, he said he wanted the bylaw “enforced more aggressively,” adding city staff were “working on identifying buildings to be used as test cases,” The Province’s Lora Grindlay reported in 2009.
“We are going to move it forward and ensure that buildings are maintained,” Robertson said at the time. “What’s the use of having a bylaw if we don’t enforce it?”
Now, in 2017, a lot of people would like Robertson to answer his own question from 2009.
In the intervening eight years, while the housing crisis has only become worse, it appears the city has never taken the step of undertaking repairs on a singleroom-occupancy building and billing the owners.
Over the last three months, the city hasn’t been able to provide information about the bylaw’s use or lack thereof. The manager in charge of Vancouver’s buildings said the reason the city avoids that route is, in part, because of the risk of unintended consequences for both SRO tenants and taxpayers at large.
But it remains a mystery to many in the DTES, including two high-profile anti-poverty advocates who say it’s a reason they’ve decided to run for council in October’s byelection. They say the bylaw has considerable power to hold slumlords to account, because if SRO owners fail to pay for the repairs, the city can add the cost to their property-tax bill.
On June 2, the day the Balmoral’s evacuation was announced, Postmedia News asked the City of Vancouver for the number of instances in the last 30 years that the city has arranged for repair work at the Balmoral at the expense of the building ’s owners. Postmedia followed up 10 days later and spoke with a city spokesman again to ask the same question, and was told to expect an answer within two weeks, but again received no answers.
In late June, Postmedia phoned city hall again, asking a third time about the Balmoral and also expanding the scope of the question to ask how many times in the last 30 years the city has arranged for repairs, at the owner’s expense, at any of the nearly 100 privately owned SROs in the city.
Several advocates and lawyers say the answer is once in the last 30 years, and zero times in the last 20.
But the city hasn’t yet answered. Postmedia followed up again Tuesday, but no information was available by Wednesday evening. Robertson was unavailable to reply Tuesday or Wednesday to a request for comment.
Judy Graves remembers Robertson’s first mayoral campaign and the optimism she felt about the progressive candidate pledging to tackle housing issues and homelessness.
“I was thrilled when he was first elected, because I completely believed he was going to do what he said he’d do,” said Graves, who worked for the city for 39 years, most recently as its advocate for the homeless until her retirement in 2013. “And it has completely broken my heart. The promises that he made, it was the difference between life and death for people I was caring for in the streets.”
When Graves decided last month to run for the city council seat vacated by Vision Coun. Geoff Meggs, the issue of SRO management was “absolutely” a key factor motivating her, she said.
“It’s one thing to say you’re going to end homelessness and fail. It’s another thing to go out and create it,” Graves said. “If you’re not going to protect that very last bit of housing stock before people hit the street, then you’re going to have massive amounts of homelessness.”
Even if the Balmoral isn’t where people might choose to lay their head if they have other options, its 176 rooms represent a critical piece of the city’s housing stock. It is, Graves said, “absolutely the housing of last resort.”
The issue is driving another council candidacy, that of Carnegie Community Action Project organizer Jean Swanson, who said, “I’d just like them to use the bylaw. It’s a travesty.”
If the city had undertaken repairs at the Balmoral a few years ago, Swanson said, it might not have deteriorated to the point where it needed to be evacuated.
“The city should have been enforcing the bylaw decades (ago) to keep the maintenance standards up, so that it wouldn’t have got to this stage,” Swanson said.
“And now is the time for them to show they learned from the Balmoral by enforcing the maintenance standards in other hotels before it gets to the stage of the Balmoral.”
Kaye Krishna, Vancouver’s general manager of development, buildings and licensing, said it was the city’s longstanding practice not to use the bylaw to undertake repairs at an SRO owner’s expense, choosing instead to hold them responsible using other avenues.
“This philosophy of not using it and trying to take other pathways predates this administration. It goes back quite a ways, and I can’t speak to all the rationale for that, but there’s been a precedent that’s been followed,” Krishna said.
She added that the city wants to avoid unintended consequences for both vulnerable tenants, who could be displaced, and for
taxpayers, who could be on the hook for repair costs.
“There are risks inherent in doing that, and a risk that taxpayer dollars are going to support these private landlords who are not upholding their responsibilities in a way that may or may not get recouped,” she said.
Asked about the city’s ability to go after repair costs through the building owners’ property taxes, Krishna said while that’s possible, it raises the question of if the city would want to follow through and eventually seize such a building if its owner didn’t pay.
“Those are risks too, if the city ends up taking on, owning and operating a number of SROs,” said Krishna, who was hired by Vancouver a little over a year ago after serving as chief of staff at the New York housing department.
Still, DTES advocates like Graves and Swanson say it’s been more than two decades since the city even tried this method to force SRO repairs, and many wonder why that is. Graves could only speculate why the city’s so reluctant to take this route, speculating it could be due to cautionary advice from a conservative legal department.
“But no one can figure it out,” Graves said. “It’s a black-hole mystery.”