Gastown redevelopment raises red flags
Anti-poverty advocate says it ‘wouldn’t be strange’ if some SRO units were lost
B.C. Housing says it will replace all 80 single-room occupancy units that will be lost when the historic Stanley and New Fountain hotels are torn down and replaced.
But it isn’t that simple because a 1995 city document, Change in Downtown SRO Stock 1970-1994, listed the two hotels in Gastown as having 103 of the low-rent rooms, not 80.
The City of Vancouver can charge a developer $125,000 for each SRO room lost through a redevelopment. This means B.C. Housing and its private partner in the redevelopment, Westbank, could have been liable for a payment of $2,875,000 for the 23 lost SRO rooms.
But they won’t have to pay it. When part of the New Fountain became a homeless shelter in 2008, the SRO designation for 23 rooms vanished.
“In this case, B.C. Housing is replacing both the 80 previously operating SRO rooms, with social housing in the new development and the 56 (homeless) shelter beds are being replaced in another location,” the City of Vancouver said in a statement.
“Their actions are helping to meet a critical need for both new, self-contained social housing units for low-income residents and shelter space for those experiencing homelessness. The City is therefore not proposing to charge them $125,000 per room.”
Anti-poverty advocate Jean Swanson isn’t surprised.
“It’s at the discretion of council,” she said. “It wouldn’t be strange for them to replace fewer units than they’re demolishing. They’re doing that at Roddan Lodge, which has 157 units, and they’re only replacing 140 with low-income units. The rest are higher income.”
The city-owned Roddan Lodge is at Dunlevy and Alexander.
“There’s another private development on the corner of Main and Union by Bonnis which is going to be a condo development. In order to put it in, they’re going to have to demolish the Creekside Rooms, which has 22 units, and they’re only going to replace 19 of them, so we’ll lose three.
“So they do that all the time. We just did our hotel report … we lost 500 units last year in the Downtown Eastside. Rents went up $139 per month, average rents for privately owned and run SROs.”
That said, the Stanley-New Fountain deal is so complex that even Swanson couldn’t quite decipher what was going on.
“I tried myself to figure it out, in terms of how many units were SROs and what was the relationship to the shelter and all that,” said Swanson. “And I ended up throwing up my hands.”
The redevelopment has sparked controversy because it would involve tearing down two historic buildings and leaving their facades.
The two-storey New Fountain Hotel was built at 45 West Cordova in Gastown in 1899, while the three-storey Stanley Hotel opened as the Iroquois at 21 West Cordova in 1906. Both are in the municipally, provincially and federally designated Gastown Heritage District.
The New Fountain and Stanley were rebuilt in 1970-71 as part of an earlier revitalization. But they’ve fallen into disrepair in recent years, while their ownership has bounced among the city, the Portland Hotel Society and Westbank.
B.C. Housing bought the site from Westbank for $2.95 million in 2015. But an official at B.C. Housing said “a condition of the sale was that Westbank will manage the redevelopment of the land and will choose the builder.”
Thus B.C. Housing and Westbank are partners in a project that would build two new buildings on the site, one largely for social housing, one for 62 units of market rental units.
The proposed market rental building is 32.6 metres high, which exceeds the Gastown height limit of 22.8 metres.
That alarms heritage activists, who feel the city is telling developers they can bend the rules if they build social or rental housing.
“We have a height limit, but here we are again just breaking it, no problem,” said Stewart Burgess of Heritage Vancouver.
“There’s also a bigger question about conflicting priorities at the city. Blood Alley, which is right behind the site, is undergoing redevelopment.
“The city is spending a lot of time and money consulting and doing the redevelopment of that public space and then they’re going to allow this building to just overshadow it? It’s strange.”
The city confirmed B.C. Housing and Westbank had applied for a $100,000 facade grant for the Stanley and New Fountain, but were turned down.
“(The) project delivers generally low conservation outcome, given that the two designated buildings are proposed for demolition, where only principal facades are to be retained,” said a city official in an email.