SRO crisis in the DTES

Since January 2006, one in five open lodging house rooms located in Vancouver have been sold or put up for sale. The majority of these rooms have been bought by developers. The city's SROs are closing at an alarming rate - just in the past week, folks have been evicted from the Picadilly Hotel (which has 39 rooms, 12 are occupied by low-income residents and the rest are not occupied because welfare has refused to give cheques to tenants who want to rent rooms there).

Dave Eby, a staff lawyer at Pivot Legal Society said:
“Our research with CCAP shows that now, more than ever, City Council must send a strong message to property speculators that low-income buildings will not be converted to market housing until there is a real commitment from our senior levels of government to replace them with social housing...without this commitment, we will see the over 1,000 people who live in these rooms on our streets, and we simply can’t afford that.”

I know there's been a lot of talk about developing the DTES into a "heritage district", similarly to what Gastown has become. Big developers (such as Robert Wilson, who heads many condo projects) have been snatching these hotels like hungry wolves on the prowl for more - in the past year, we've seen 22 hotels change hands and 10 more are up for sale(average cost of $60,000 a room). This form of development is happening without any kind of social housing being built, as said by Dave Eby. City Council was supposed to vote on a moratorium on converting these hotels to anything else than social housing last week, but it keeps getting postponed. I'll update more as I get more information.

Information taken from Pivot Legal Society Newswire & the Carnegie Community Action Project