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Cheap Rooms Off the Block?

Rare deal could save Eastside SRO.

Tom Sandborn 20 Mar 2007TheTyee.ca

Tom Sandborn is a regular contributor to The Tyee with a focus on labour and health issues.

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Affordable rooms safe, for now

Housing demonstrations in Vancouver's poverty- and drug-blighted Downtown Eastside rarely end in celebration. More than 500 affordable single room occupancy (SRO) hotel rooms have been lost in the last year and homelessness is projected to more than double by 2010.

But on March 19, on the sidewalks outside the Carl Rooms at 575 E. Hastings, a crowd of tenants, housing advocates and homeless people had cause for optimism.

The developer-owners of the Carl Rooms (numbered company #0773477 B.C. Ltd.) are negotiating a deal with Atira Property Management, a non-profit social enterprise that already manages three other social housing sites in the Downtown Eastside, according Dave Eby from the Pivot Legal Society.

The deal, Eby told the crowd, will, at least temporarily, renovate the Carl, refill the rooms emptied by earlier evictions and hold rents stable at the welfare housing allowance level of $375 per month.

Most tenants faced eviction

"We were contacted by a tenant at the Carl two weeks ago, and we immediately contacted the new owners," Eby told the Tyee. "We knew they had purchased the building two months ago from previous owners who had already evicted many of the building's 46 residents. It was our understanding that the majority of the remaining tenants had been served with eviction orders. We expressed our concerns about yet another block of affordable SROs going missing in this neighbourhood, and opened up discussions about the possibility of preserving this vital housing."

The owners' representative told Eby they were open to a solution that didn't involve emptying the Carl, and told Pivot on Friday, March 16 that their hope was to renovate and improve the building while keeping rents at affordable levels. The owners also expressed some frustration with the challenges posed by what they saw as problem tenants, Eby told The Tyee. So he recommended they explore the option of having the building managed by a non-profit with experience in running a Downtown Eastside hotel.

By Monday morning, when demonstrators gathered outside the Carl, Eby was able to announce an imminent deal to save the Rooms as affordable SRO housing.

"This is a small victory, and a model we hope other developers look at for investment properties," Eby told The Tyee. " But this can't be viewed as a long-term solution. The housing at the Carl Rooms may well be saved for a while, and that is a good thing. But these are still developers and will, in the end, make decisions based on the need to make a profit. The real solution is government-sponsored social housing to replace SROs."

Deal not sealed

Reached at the end of the day Monday, Ali Bakhtiari, who speaks for the numbered company that owns the Carl, told The Tyee that the company was in final discussions with Atira Property Management with a view toward engaging the non-profit to manage the Carl Rooms.

"We just have to confirm a few numbers," Bakhtiari told The Tyee," but we expect to have a contract with them soon. We'll have a final decision sometime this week."

Bakhtiari said the new owners had originally bought the Carl Rooms as an investment, but visits to the site had changed their attitude.

"Once we saw the situation down here, we thought maybe there was something we could do to help. We want to keep the rents at between $375 and $400 a month and try to improve the building. We see this as a long-term decision."

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