Vancouver to offer up land in bid to move SROs from Granville Entertainment District
The amendment directs staff to work with BC Housing and the province to offer up city-owned sites to replace existing single room occupancy (SRO) and supportive housing units in the non-residential Entertainment Core area with 'modern, dignified, self-contained housing, with robust wraparound services.'
Tabled by ABC Coun. Peter Meiszner, the amendment relates to publicly-owned buildings between Smithe and Davie Streets in the Granville Entertainment District (GED).
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'The city will come to the table with some free land,' Meiszner told Global News in an interview Wednesday. 'We're looking for provincial and federal government funding to transition these units off of Granville Street.'
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The initial report to council on the Granville Street Plan proposed restricting new residential uses in the three-block Entertainment Core where current SROs 'will be replaced over time and SRO and tenant relocation would be secured off-site.'
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According to the City of Vancouver, there are eight Single Room Accommodation (SRA) buildings containing roughly 600 rooms on the Granville Strip.
Many are privately owned, while others are social and supportive housing projects owned by the city and the provincial government.
Those living in the old Howard Johnson at 1976 Granville Street, which was purchased by the province in June 2020 and transitioned to temporary supportive housing during the COVID-19 pandemic, said they've endured chaos inside.
'It's horrible,' said Luugat resident Debora Taylor. 'My next door neighbour, who is in the mental hospital now, she set a fire in my room and after that, two floods.'
'This building's got to be knocked down because there's so much flooding,' said Stephen Keith Walsh.
Walsh, who said he is on two wait lists for housing, is currently sleeping outside Aura Nightclub, which is on the ground level of the former Howard Johnson building.
Aura has experienced constant flooding from the units above it, and even Walsh, whose ex-partner lives in the Luugat supportive housing, questions the decision to move people from encampments into the former hotel.
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'Why would they, BC Housing, pick up all these people off the street and put them in a brand new building when these people haven't even (gone) through any kind of screening or anything,' Walsh told Global News in an interview. 'They just throw them into a place — half of these people, you see the rooms, they're destroyed.'
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As to when the Howard Johnson rooms will be decommissioned, B.C.'s housing minister said the challenge is always where to move people.
'From the BC Housing perspective, we go to wherever there's an opportunity,' said Ravi Kahlon. 'If the council decides that there (are) better locations and they are able to approve them for us, we certainly will consider those options, but at this point we have to go with what we have.'
Tyler, who lives in the Dominion Hotel SRO in Gastown and declined to provide his last name, said buildings to house vulnerable people have to go somewhere.
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'It can't all be downtown East End, or in that one on East 2nd Avenue, it's got to be all over the place, people got to have somewhere safe to go,' Tyler said.
After dealing with more than 200 floods in the last five years from the former Howard Johnson rooms above his club, Aura owner Alan Goodall has a suggestion for the design of any new supportive housing builds.
'They need to have rooms that are basically tiled with a drain in the middle of it because as sure as you're born, the sprinkler heads are going to go off,' Goodall told Global News. 'They need rooms that are almost bomb-proof.'
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