Housing Providers Need More Money to Keep SROs Safe, Says Atira CEO

BC Housing needs to come up with more money and streamlined processes to fix a potentially deadly safety crisis in aging single-room occupancy hotels, according to the province’s largest supportive-housing operator.

The urgent call came less than two weeks after an inquest into two deaths in the Winters Hotel fire that revealed a multitude of ongoing safety failures.

Catherine Roome, the interim CEO of Atira Women’s Resource Society, told The Tyee that one of its other buildings is in such bad shape its fire escapes can’t be used.

And Atira needs more funding to safely operate the over one dozen hotels it is currently under contract to run, Roome said. Some of those properties are owned by the province, while others are privately owned.

Roome said Atira is considering erecting scaffolding at the Arco Hotel at 83 W. Pender St. because of the state of the fire escapes.

She said it’s just one example of severe safety problems in SROs in Vancouver — buildings that are now often over a century old and house people living in poverty, with disabilities and severe addictions and mental illness.

Arco residents who have mobility issues have already been moved out of the building, Roome said. “We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for life safety.”

The Winters was a privately owned building that Atira operated for low-income residents, with funding from BC Housing. On April 11, 2022, a fire started at the building and quickly grew out of control, killing two residents, Mary Ann Garlow and Dennis Guay.

An inquest that ran from Jan. 22 to Feb. 5 heard that the building’s alarm and sprinkler systems were 50 years old, that staff had received little or no training in fire safety and that the building manager waited three days to call a fire services company to reset the building’s alarm and fire extinguishers following a previous fire.

On Tuesday, Atira held a one-day forum to focus on how to improve safety in its buildings, inviting first responders, other non-profit service providers and tenants. Roome said the takeaways were clear.

“We need more housing — we need purpose-built social housing, we need more funding,” she said. “So now it's time for BC Housing and the minister of housing to step up.”

Roome took over the top job at Atira, the province’s largest provider of supportive housing, following the release of a provincial government report that found glaring conflict of interest lapses between BC Housing and Atira.

The investigation, released May 5, 2023, found that former BC Housing CEO Shayne Ramsay had improperly pushed funding and projects to Atira, a non-profit then headed by his wife, Janice Abbott.

The investigation did not find that either Ramsay or Abbott had personally benefited from Ramsay’s activities, but Atira had received more funding than other, similar organizations. In 2021, Atira received $41.7 million from the B.C. government, compared with $29.8 million for Lookout, the next-highest-funded provider. Abbott resigned shortly after the release of the government’s investigation.

Supportive housing provides housing for people who have been homeless or are at risk of falling into homelessness and is supposed to include staffing to provide services and help to keep residents housed.

Supportive housing can be operated in buildings that are much like apartment rental buildings, with self-contained suites that include bathrooms and kitchens.

But many SROs, which feature tiny rooms without bathrooms or kitchens, are also operated as supportive housing.

The government report on the conflict of interest lapses at BC Housing followed reporting by The Tyee on safety concerns from people who live and work in SROs operated by Atira.

Atira currently operates 19 SROs. Since 2021, it has ceased operating or will not have its contract renewed for eight SRO hotels, including four buildings that are owned by the province (the Hutchinson, the Hazelwood, the Gastown and the Patricia).

Roome, who previously headed Technical Safety BC, said Atira has since “turned a corner” with a governance review, new board members and improvements to safety policies.

Roome said BC Housing now needs to take a look at its practices when it comes to funding large supportive-housing providers.

BC Housing’s current approach isn’t working, she said. It can take up to nine months to approve budgets and review many maintenance funding requests from housing providers.

“The issue is, when you have large entities like Atira that have very large projects, they're almost like Crown corporations in and of themselves,” Roome said. “So if you are manually approving maintenance and repair, and we have 5,000 maintenance tickets a year, BC Housing on its own cannot scale the level of improvement or level of approving an urgency that we need to operate in real time.”

Atira is part of a group of 19 supportive-housing providers with similar funding challenges calling for changes, Roome said.