New Atira CEO Cites Progress, But Safety Is Still an Issue

An embattled supportive housing provider has decided to sell a $1.2-million loft office space and will no longer operate a troubled single-room occupancy hotel, following a conflict of interest scandal that raised serious concerns about how the organization has been awarded millions in government funding.

While the interim CEO of Atira Women’s Resource Society says progress has been made since she took on the job on May 30, she adds there is still more work to be done to ensure safe conditions for residents and staff at Atira-operated buildings.

“Having worked in health and safety, it is really kind of an extraordinary situation when I go to some of these work sites,” said Catherine Roome, who previously headed Technical Safety BC. “I’m looking at employees and saying, ‘I cannot believe this is the environment we ask you to work in.’”

Workers and tenants have been raising alarms about problems at the buildings for years. In April 2022, two tenants died when the Atira-operated Winters Hotel burned down. Atira houses some of the most vulnerable people in the province, including women fleeing violence and people with substance use and mental health issues.

But changes at the housing provider did not come until Atira, which is B.C.’s biggest operator of supportive housing, was involved in a conflict of interest scandal that led to the resignations of Shayne Ramsay, former CEO of BC Housing, and his wife, Janice Abbott, former CEO of Atira.

An investigation report commissioned by the provincial government found that Ramsay had broken BC Housing’s conflict of interest rules numerous times when he pushed for projects and funding to be handed to Atira. (The audit did not find that either Ramsay or Abbott had enriched themselves or misused government money.) Abbott resigned on May 15, one week after the release of the audit.

Roome has pledged that improving safety and financial management would be her main priorities.

Ahead of a Vancouver city council vote to approve nearly $800,000 in grants for Atira projects, Roome said work on improving how the social services organization operates is ongoing. Atira has introduced a whistleblower line, conducted a risk assessment and reviewed all its operating contracts and real estate assets.

The union that represents Atira workers says there are still serious concerns about new relief staff not getting adequate training, including on how to respond to overdoses.

“Those are key issues that we’ve identified with management that need to be addressed and have still not been addressed,” said Paul Finch, treasurer of the BC General Employees’ Union.

Atira’s stated mission is to end violence against women, and many of its employees are women or gender-diverse people. Finch said a major focus for the union is ensuring that AWRS workers are included in a sectoral contract that includes other major supportive housing providers, like RainCity and PHS, and would lead to higher wages for AWRS staff.

“Despite Atira’s own employees pushing for gender wage equity, they’re refusing to support that push,” Finch said, adding the issue is being discussed during ongoing collective bargaining.

Roome said there is still discussion about which sectoral agreement to place AWRS workers in with the BCGEU as well as with the Public Sector Employers’ Council.

Roome said she shares the concerns about employees not being adequately trained and the organization is working on improving, but she said a top-down approach likely won’t work and employees need to be fully involved.

Atira will no longer operate Patricia Hotel

After the investigation report was made public, B.C. Premier David Eby pledged a full audit of both Atira Women’s Resource Society and its for-profit subsidiary, Atira Property Management. BC Housing says Atira Women’s Resource Society and another arm of the organization, Atira Development Society, are currently undergoing an operational review, conducted by accounting firm KPMG.

Any BC Housing funding for new Atira projects continues to be frozen while that review is underway, according to BC Housing.

The asset review Atira has conducted under Roome’s leadership led to the decision to sell a 1,500-square-foot office space at 35 Gore Ave. in Vancouver’s Railtown neighbourhood. The live-work loft on the ground floor of a ’90s-era condo building called the Edge is listed at $1.25 million, down from the $1.3 million Atira paid for the property in 2020, according to information in the real estate listing. Listing photographs show a stylish interior and a kitchen with a high-end Wolf gas stove, which retails between $4,000 and $9,000.

Roome said she didn’t know why Atira previously made the decision to buy the extra office, but “as somebody who’s trying to support the financial health of the organization, we don’t need to hang on to capital assets that are not serving people that we’re meant to serve.”

Atira has also decided to no longer continue its contract to operate one particularly troubled property, the Patricia, a single-room occupancy hotel on East Hastings Street.

The provincial government bought the relatively well-kept SRO in 2021 and used the building to house residents of a large tent city that had formed at Strathcona Park.

An internal staff survey conducted in 2022 and obtained by The Tyee shows the Patricia had the second-highest number of critical incidents among Atira-operated buildings: between April 2021 and March 2022, staff at the Patricia recorded 122 critical incidents. The highest number of incidents, 159, was recorded at the Luugat, a former Howard Johnson hotel also bought by the province to house formerly homeless people.

Roome said there was a $500,000 shortfall between what it cost to operate the building and the amount of BC Housing funding Atira receives for the Patricia, making it not feasible to continue to operate the SRO.

Financial management and fire safety

While a 2018 financial review commissioned by BC Housing found long-running problems with financial management at Atira, Roome said the way BC Housing distributes funding to non-profits makes for a challenging operating environment for all housing providers who rely on provincial money.

BC Housing often does not approve non-profit organizations’ budgets until months after they’ve been submitted. When buildings require emergency maintenance, non-profits have to submit extraordinary-expense requests to BC Housing, which can take months to approve.

“An entity like Atira ends up floating the government for expenses that continue to flow even while they’re not being paid for,” Roome said. “And that’s what causes the cash flow crisis: you are paying your suppliers... and you may not receive compensation for those extraordinary expenses, never mind the operating expense that may be also underwater — and that can go on for up to 18 months.”

Fire safety is also something the organization has been working to improve, Roome said. In addition to the fatal fire at the Winters Hotel in 2022, there has been a sharp uptick in fires at SROs throughout the Downtown Eastside, sometimes leading to entire building evacuations and costly repairs.

Roome said Atira staff have been working closely with Vancouver Fire Rescue Services to improve fire safety. But, she said, there needs to be a funding increase to pay for the increased staffing to properly conduct fire watches and other safety measures to prevent or respond to fires.

“This is one of the most important underlying reasons why I’m talking to BC Housing about health, safety and security funding,” Roome said.

BC Housing has promised to make more information public after the operational review is completed, but former Atira tenants like David Wesley still have questions about what the money Atira received from the government was being spent on.

Wesley lived at the Colonial Hotel for four years, finally leaving to move to better housing in June 2021.

He believes that if he had lived in the Colonial for much longer, there’s a good likelihood he would not have survived. When Wesley lived at the building, it was infested with rats, cockroaches and fleas, and he and many of his neighbours said drinking the water made them sick.

“I don’t think the Colonial got one cent of it,” said Wesley.