On February 15, downtown eastside residents and housing activists established a tent village at 58 West Hastings Street – a Concord Pacific property currently being leased by VANOC for use as a parking lot.

No more empty talk, no more empty lots

Instead of empty lots and empty promises, the Rally for Housing and the Olympic Tent Village are calling for:
1. real action to end homelessness now
2. end to condo development and displacement in the downtown eastside
3. end to discriminatory ticketing, police harassment and all forms of the criminalization of poverty

The rally was organized by the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre Power of Women Group. For more information, including more video footage, check out the tent village webpage.

Slow conversions, gentrification, and that $@#% sporting event

As previously reported here and elsewhere, the residents of the Golden Crown Hotel (116 West Hastings) have been displaced en masse. It can now be confirmed that the landlord’s efforts to induce tenants to leave the hotel were undertaken so that the landlord could deliver vacant possession of the property to its new owners.

In the beginning of November, the hotel was sold to 116 West Hastings Holdings Ltd. The hotel was boarded up, and renovations began. In December, makeshift signs advertising rooms for rent went up outside the boarded up front entryway of the hotel. Calls to the listed number revealed that rooms were expected to be ready for February 1, with rents to be between $675 and $850. The street-face of the hotel underwent a face-lift.

Compare this to the story a few months earlier. Back in September, when we first spoke out about the pressures on tenants to vacate the hotel, the City assured us that the repairs to be undertaken at the Golden Crown did not necessitate the eviction of tenants. They did not think the tenants were seriously at risk. When we contacted the City two months later, the City assured us that the repairs were “just cosmetic”, and did not amount to a conversion under the SRA bylaw.

The Golden Crown Hotel is just the latest in a long line of the neighbourhood’s single room occupancy hotels to be emptied of tenants in order to facilitate a property transfer. We have been speaking out about this for years. Check out this story from 2007.

The Golden Crown will soon find itself across the street from BC Housing’s new Orwellian hub for disseminating information to ‘combat potential negative press’ about homelessness. Not to mention the shiny new Woodwards development itself. The creation of streetscapes with the appropriate visual cues appears to have taken priority over protecting the low-income rental stock in the neighbourhood, or the tenancies of its current residents.

(At least) one Golden Crown tenant gets to stay

One tenant of the Golden Crown refused to sign the end of tenancy agreements circulated by the landlord, and continued to assert his right to his rental unit, even after he was locked out. This week, the Residential Tenancy Branch confirmed that this resident’s tenancy at the hotel continues, and ordered that the landlord allow this tenant back into his old room at the hotel. The landlord has until the middle of February to deliver the rental unit back to the tenant.

Winters Hotel Settlement

As a result of a settlement negotiated in a hearing before the Residential Tenancy Branch, residents of the Winters Hotel (203 Abbott Street) have received compensation for living without heat for over a month, and a promise from the hotel’s owner that he will increase his involvement in the day to day management of the hotel, and work to address other ongoing standards of maintenance deficiencies.

In December, we began working with tenants of the Winters, who had been without heat since mid-November. Twenty-four tenants banded together in a claim for dispute resolution before the Residential Tenancy Branch. These tenants, along with the other residents of the hotel, were without heat during the coldest part of this winter. Environment Canada forecast an extended period of subzero temperatures around the time the landlord was ordered by the City to repair or replace the heating system. Due to the quality of the electrical system in the hotel, residents were unable to operate portable heaters in their rooms during this period. They had no relief from the cold. Heat was not returned to the hotel until December 24.

Update on 2131 Pandora Street

A number of former tenants of 2131 Pandora Street who were unable to file their claims with the Residential Tenancy Branch in 2008 have now had their applications heard. Seven hearings took place in the first week of January. People were able to speak of the trauma and hardship they experienced during and subsequent to the roof collapse, flood and evacuation of the apartment building. More than two years after the event, it was clear that the events at 2131 Pandora Street have had a lasting impact on the lives of those who were living there during this crisis. We hope that the forthcoming decisions honour these tenants’ experiences.

What’s going on this month: The Assistance to Shelter Act

Bill 14 – No welfare for those with outstanding arrest warrants… again

Update on the Golden Crown mass eviction

Guest access, registration and other restrictions

Assistance to Shelter? – An Interventionist Strategy for ‘Vanishing’ Homelessness

On November 23, DERA held a community meeting to discuss the latest piece of Rich Coleman’s peculiar strategy for combating homelessness – the Assistance to Shelter Act. David Eby from the BC Civil Liberties Association and PIVOT’s Laura Track were on hand to discuss the legislation and answer questions. The BC Liberals have now pushed through the Legislature a law that relies on police presence and the use of force to get people to the door of a shelter. And that’s it. The net effect is to give the police additional authority to move people from one location to another, with the ability to use ‘reasonable force’ if someone is unwilling to pick up and go voluntarily.

The authoritarian and paternalistic nature of Coleman’s interventionist strategy undermines any legitimate priority of protection or of meaningfully addressing homelessness. Coleman uses the emotive issue of a homeless woman’s death to justify the use of coercive force on the most vulnerable. No other jurisdiction in North America has adopted a similar ’strategy’ for addressing homelessness. The government’s own research shows that, consistently across Canada and in the US, people can only be seized from the street under the authority of mental health legislation. Except in BC.

Bill 18 – the Assistance to Shelter Act – passed third reading in the Legislature the same day as Bill 14, which further restricts access to income assistance for people who may be at risk of homelessness by prohibiting the payment of income assistance to people for whom an outstanding arrest warrant has been issued.

One of the three strategic priority actions that the City of Vancouver has identified as having the most impact on reducing homelessness is income, and reducing barriers to accessing income assistance. Adequate income is needed to prevent homelessness by ensuring that people can maintain their housing. Pretty intuitive stuff… but here we have Coleman creating barriers to accessing income assistance the very same day the so-called assistance to shelter legislation is passed.

Bill 14: What will it mean for you?

Coleman has indicated that the application for income assistance will be amended to include a question about whether a person has any outstanding arrest warrants. Applicants will be asked to sign a consent form for a criminal record check.

People already receiving social assistance will be asked to sign the consent form for the criminal record check at the time of their annual review. The question about outstanding arrest warrants will be on the annual review application forms.

People on welfare in the ‘expected to work’ category will be asked to check a box regarding outstanding warrants each month as part of their confirmation of eligibility. Cheque stubs will likely be modified to allow for a question about outstanding warrants.

The NDP tried to do this by regulation in 1997. In Grace v British Columbia, Madam Justice Baker of the BC Supreme Court struck down the regulations as contrary to the intent and purpose of social assistance legislation, which is to relieve poverty, suffering and neglect and provide assistance to persons in need.

Not surprisingly, Coleman disagrees with the BC Supreme Court, and thinks excluding people from a social benefits scheme for reasons that have nothing to do with their need for assistance is a good idea.

Update on the Golden Crown mass eviction

In early September, DERA Advocacy Service began assisting tenants who informed us that they were being told to leave their rental units at the Golden Crown Hotel (116 West Hastings Street). Tenants came to us with reports that their landlord was attempting to force them out with less than a week’s notice. The landlord had circulated makeshift ‘mutual end of tenancy’ agreements, and was attempting to get as many tenants as possible to waive their rights under the Residential Tenancy Act.

DERA Executive Director Kim Kerr spoke out publicly against the landlord’s attempt to empty the hotel. We advocated for the City to issue the necessary orders for the landlord to clean up the hotel, and rid it of pests, without the need for the hotel to displace residents from their housing.

Throughout the month of October, the landlord used inducments to convince as many tenants as possible to leave the hotel. Tenants came to us concerned that the landlord would change the locks on their rooms and that they would lose all of their personal belongings. This has now come to pass. The hotel is completely boarded up, and tenants have been left in the lurch. We are not the only ones drawing connections between the erosion of low-income housing and the approaching Olympics.

Units of low-income housing lost: 28

For more details see media reports in: Megaphone Magazine and CBC News

Guest access, registration and other restrictions

Guest rules and access restrictions is another issue affecting downtown eastside residents. Non-profit housing providers in the downtown eastside continue in their attempts to enforce rules regarding guest access and registration that have no basis in the Residential Tenancy Act. Tenants in a number of hotels have come to us with reports of restrictions on overnight guests, requirements that guests produce government-issued ID as a condition of entry and other rules regarding guest access. DERA Advocacy Service has assisted tenants in successfully challenging these rules in a number of hearings before the Residential Tenancy Branch. However, more work is needed in order to ensure that landlords comply with the Act and tenants’ legal rights are respected.