Youth and Tenants with Mental Illness Lived in a Filthy, Violent Government SRO

Documents obtained by The Tyee paint a horrific picture of life in a government-owned single-room occupancy hotel that was sheltering vulnerable youth and people with severe mental illness.

The records, obtained through freedom of information requests, deal with conditions in the 93-unit building in 2021. Atira Property Management Inc. continues to operate the BC Housing-owned building.

BC Housing has told The Tyee that since the complaints, it has frequently inspected the building and worked with Atira to improve conditions inside the SRO.

But the emails and letters obtained by The Tyee show vulnerable tenants were living in terrible conditions in 2021. Other support agencies working in the building questioned Atira’s management and how a government-owned building could have been left to deteriorate so badly.

And at least one letter noted “the sensitivities that exist between the operator and its funder.” Atira’s then CEO, Janice Abbott, is married to former BC Housing CEO Shayne Ramsay, and a report in 2023 found he broke conflict of interest rules to benefit Atira.

According to correspondence sent to BC Housing in 2021, organized crime gangs were active in St. Helen’s, a six-storey single-room occupancy hotel at 1161 Granville St.

Residents were living with sewage in their rooms for as long as two months and underage teens were regularly getting into the building.

Some tenants didn’t have working electrical outlets or lights in their room for up to a year, while others were subjected to “avoidable violence” because of a volatile mix of tenants, according to a Sept. 1, 2021, letter signed by staff from Coast Mental Health, Foundry and a psychiatrist at St. Paul’s Hospital, Dr. Dan Lin.

At the time, Coast Mental Health and Foundry were providing tenant support services to St. Helen’s residents.

The letter says two tenants had been at risk of losing their housing after Atira made clerical mistakes that led to rent not being deducted from their welfare cheques — an arrangement that is supposed to help supportive-housing residents stay housed.

Meanwhile, other tenants who should have been evicted because of violent behaviour were allowed to stay in the building for months, according to the correspondence.

The letters and urgent requests for meetings with BC Housing were sparked by news stories in The Tyee and the Glacier Media publication Vancouver Is Awesome.

Glacier reporter Mike Howell had written about multiple fire and building violations at St. Helen’s on Aug. 13, 2021. A Tyee story about working and living conditions inside APMI-operated SROs appeared on Aug. 30, 2021.

SROs are century-old hotels located throughout downtown Vancouver. They have small rooms, shared bathrooms and no kitchens and have become the housing of last resort for the city’s poorest and most vulnerable people.

Over the past 20 years, the provincial government has bought a large number of SRO hotels in an attempt to save affordable housing units and improve the condition of the buildings.

Coast Mental Health told BC Housing that staff had had numerous safety concerns at the provincially owned building for years. The publication of the two news stories sparked a renewed effort by CMH to raise their concerns with BC Housing. It called on the agency to end the Atira contract.

The email correspondence shows that ultimately BC Housing staff chose to disregard Coast Mental Health’s request to remove APMI. That decision led Coast Mental Health to end its long-standing contract at St. Helen’s on Feb. 16, 2022.

Coast Mental Health and Foundry confirmed they had ended their contracts to provide support services to tenants at St. Helen’s in early 2022.

“We haven’t had any connections with this property since the contract ended,” Coast Mental Health told The Tyee in an email.

After Coast Mental Health and Foundry left the building, BC Housing gave Atira more funding to both manage the building and provide support to the tenants.

In an emailed statement, Atira said that expanded funding enabled the organization to increase staffing and support at St. Helen’s and hire an assistant manager, health support workers and tenant support workers, “as well as a meal program which has delivered sustained improvements.”

Atira also works with Vancouver Coastal Health “to connect tenants to further health and wellness support.”

BC Housing says that after the complaints from Coast Mental Health and Foundry, it stepped up inspections of St. Helen’s and supported Atira to “handle all identified concerns.” After the most recent inspection in 2023, BC Housing found that St. Helen’s was well maintained, according to a statement sent to The Tyee by email.

“BC Housing continues to work closely with Atira to address additional issues as they arise and to ensure tenants have ongoing stable housing and support,” according to the statement.

Conflict of interest violations and a fatal fire

Atira Women’s Resource Society, the parent organization of APMI, went through a management shakeup in 2023 after a government investigation found that then BC Housing CEO Shayne Ramsay had repeatedly pushed for funding and contracts to be given to Atira, which was led by his wife, Abbott.

According to whistleblowers who have spoken with The Tyee, Ramsay routinely violated conflict of interest rules from the time he and Abbott married in 2010. The province’s investigation found that Atira’s BC Housing funding ballooned between 2016 and 2022. By 2022, Atira had become BC Housing’s “largest funding recipient,” according to the investigation report.

Ramsay left BC Housing in September 2022, while Abbott stepped down from Atira in May 2023, shortly after the province’s investigation was made public. The investigation did not find that Ramsay or Abbott had personally benefited from the conflict of interest breaches.

The interim CEO of Atira, Catherine Roome, has pledged to focus on improving safety at Atira buildings and on fixing the organization’s shoddy governance practices.

Atira’s safety record was also put under scrutiny when one of the SROs the organization operates, the privately owned Winters Hotel, burned down on April 11, 2022, killing two tenants. A coroner’s inquest that ran for two weeks in January found that staff had little or no fire safety training and the manager on duty at the time of an earlier fire had waited three days to reset sprinklers, fire extinguishers and alarms.

BC Housing had never inspected the building before signing an operating agreement with Atira to run it.

The Tyee first submitted an FOI request for documents related to Coast Mental Health’s concerns about St. Helen’s on Dec. 16, 2022, in the midst of reporting on the conflict of interest concerns. The Tyee did not receive the complete FOI response until Feb. 16, 2024.

BC Housing picked Atira over CMH to operate St. Helen’s

Many of the complaints Coast Mental Health sent to BC Housing in 2021 related to the safety of its staff. Senior staff wrote that frontline staff had been menaced by an aggressive dog on one of the floors, a situation that went on for two months. On Nov. 10, 2021, Tracy Rapanos, director of community services for Coast Mental Health, wrote that a “number of weapons” had been reported at the building.

There was “almost no security” in the building and doors were being propped open. That was leading to “increased gang activity,” Rapanos wrote, despite the fact that the building’s purpose was to provide safe housing to people living with mental illness.

In an email sent on Oct. 7, 2021, the then CEO of Coast Mental Health, Darrell Burnham, told BC Housing that CMH would be pulling out of their contract unless BC Housing changed the operator of St. Helen’s.

But that didn’t happen, and on Nov. 19, 2021, Burnham told BC Housing the agency would end its St. Helen’s contract. Burnham has since retired.

In his Nov. 19 letter sent to Betty Lepps, director of supportive housing at BC Housing, Burnham reminded Lepps of CMH’s long association with St. Helen’s.

“Initially Coast [Mental Health] was named as the operator in 2007, however BC Housing decided to contract with Atira Property Management Inc. as the property management company,” Burnham wrote to BC Housing. “Coast then agreed to provide tenant support.”

In an interview with Glacier Media in 2021, Atira staffer Jose Velazquez had blamed many of the building’s problems on disruptive tenants and the COVID-19 pandemic.

But Burnham said that from the time Atira started managing the building, “APMI has consistently demonstrated its inability to keep St. Helen’s safe, clean and in operational condition.”

In his letter to BC Housing, Burnham asked that a third-party investigator be brought in “to review the situation,” a suggestion he said he’d made multiple times to BC Housing.

“But I also recognize the sensitivities that exist between the operator and its funder,” he added.

The correspondence continued as Coast Mental Health prepared to exit its contract in February 2022. On Nov. 26, chief operating officer Bruce Smith wrote to BC Housing staffer Cluny MacPherson about a St. Helen’s incident he’d heard of.

Details of this incident are redacted for privacy in the documents The Tyee obtained through its freedom of information request.

But referring to the redacted incident, Smith wrote: “I certainly hope that a decision to not provide security at St. Helen’s wasn’t made in vengeance against a partner organization.

“But if true it is obviously inappropriate and certainly damaging to clients and staff alike. These are the types of interactions that have caused us such concern and led to Coast giving notice on our contract, and I’m sure you’ll agree that this is untenable for any organization.”

As Coast Mental Health prepared to communicate its decision to other community partners, Atira staffer Velazquez complained that CMH’s announcement cast Atira in a negative light and made it sound like St. Helen’s was dangerous. Velazquez asked that CMH modify the announcement.

The final announcement from Coast Mental Health made no mention of safety concerns.