bu Andrew Yan

The state of single-room- occupancy (SRO) hotels has emerged as a major policy dilemma in the Downtown Eastside. SROs can be both a problem and a solution for the impoverished neighbourhood, where poorly managed hotels have captured the headlines with their decrepit conditions while properly manag?ed hotels have quietly provided sanctuary for low-income people in Vancouver who have nowhere else to live. In this latter capacity, SRO hotels can start the healing process in the neighbourhood. However, without the mayor and city council's leadership and creativity, this final line of housing before homelessness is now gravely threatened by rapacious development.

SRO (also known as single-residential-accommodation) hotels are typically early-20th-century residential hotels with shared bathroom and cooking facilities. Historically, SROs housed single men during the winter off-season for British Columbia's mining, fishing, and forestry industries. More recently, SROs began to house low-income men and women, both old and young and of various ethnicities. Not everyone who lives in SROs is mentally ill, a criminal, or a substance abuser. Many are simply poor and need housing.

SROs matter because they are the only form of low-income housing where the city has a direct level of control. Through its zoning and regulatory policies, the city by itself has the power to affect the quality and quantity of SROs. Admittedly, SROs are not an ideal form of affordable low-income housing, as they are typically tiny units with no private bathroom or kitchen, but they are virtually the only type of housing available at welfare-shelter allowance. This is a stock that the city can ill afford to lose. Given the current political and housing environment (with surplus-rich provincial and federal governments continually refusing to invest in housing), for every SRO that is lost there is another homeless person on the streets of Greater Vancouver.

And SRO numbers have been declining, precipitously so. SROs in Vancouver dropped from 13,300 in 1970 to 6,079 in 2006. Some gains in nonmarket social housing have offset these losses, but it has hardly been keeping up. Between June 2005 and June 2006, 82 new rooms for low-income singles at the welfare rate were opened, but the city lost almost 400 units due to conversions, rent increases, and closures during the same period. With almost 5,000 units today, SROs represent almost half of the affordable low-income housing units in the Downtown Eastside.

The recent evictions at the Golden Crown Hotel, where the landlord is attempting to cash in on the 2010 windfall, promises to bring back the conversion disasters of Expo 86. Between a voracious real-estate market and the run-up to the Olympics, there is a perfect storm brewing to sweep current SRO tenants onto the streets.

Last week, the city updated its SRO bylaw, where it had originally tried to protect the SRO stock by levying a $5,000-per-room conversion fee on developers and owners. Now that conversion fee is $15,000 per unit and there is a minimum-square-foot-to-single-bed rule to prevent SRO-to-hostel conversions. The problem is that SROs, on the average, are now worth between $40,000 and $70,000 a room, and it will not be long before city council will have to revisit the issue to protect existing affordable housing. Indeed, the mayor and council seem to be focused on reactively managing the Downtown Eastside housing crisis as opposed to proactively solving it.

The February 20 provincial budget does very little to protect or improve SROs with its focus on the creation of year-round shelter beds. Shelters do not solve homelessness: homes solve homelessness. For many in the Downtown Eastside, SROs are homes. Homes, through provincial and municipal neglect, that will be lost and replaced with a bed in a homeless shelter.

The SRO dilemma is hardly unique to Vancouver, and many American cities are far more progressive and pragmatic toward their SRO stock. Many U.S. cities have policies to move SROs into nonprofit, community-based management or ownership. The city of New York has had an SRO improvement loan program for almost 20 years. Last year, the city of Los Angeles passed a conversion moratorium for its SRO stock. To combat the loss of its SROs, San Francisco implemented a series of initiatives to save its stock. For more than 27 years, San Francisco developers have had to replace each unit that is lost or pay the city 80 percent of the cost of replacing that same unit plus land-acquisition costs. Nonprofit groups in San Francisco were given the “right of enforcement”, where groups of tenants and their advocates can organize, repair blatant maintenance and safety problems, and bill the landlord. This 1990 modification of the original 1979 ordinance prevents the city of San Francisco from inadvertently becoming an eviction service through deferred building maintenance.

This is in stark contrast to Vancouver, where the city has inadvertently served as an eviction service for slumlords. (Although a strong SRO bylaw has hardly ended development in San Francisco, it has ensured that homelessness is not aggravated by real-estate speculation in low-income neighbourhoods.) The pragmatic public-policy rationale in dealing with SROs here is relatively straightforward. Homelessness is expensive to the public purse. Service and shelter costs for homeless people ranged from $30,000 to $40,000 per year per person, on average, compared to $22,000 to $28,000 per year for housed individuals (formerly homeless people living in social housing). The cost to jail this person would be $67,500 a year, or $200 per day in a correctional institution.

Just as there has been an emerging “brand” of creating a vibrant downtown, Vancouver has the opportunity to create a healthy low-income-friendly neighbourhood in the Downtown Eastside. Instead of obsessing on a “broken windows” style of policing to solve homelessness, the city should start “replacing windows” on SROs through a series of innovative supports and economic incentives for good SRO owners and disincentives for bad owners, while protecting their tenants. The recent upgrades to the city's SRO bylaw are a start, but they are largely band-aid solutions to a much larger problem.

A stable, safe, and rehabilitated stock of SRO hotels will engage Vancouver's homelessness crisis and create a chance to stabilize the neighbourhood. Many U.S. cities have painfully learned this lesson. The Downtown Eastside presents an opportunity to show the world in 2010 and beyond how Vancouver and, indeed, Canada can create compassionate and inventive solutions to the problems of homelessness and deep urban poverty.