In her decades as an activist in the Downtown Eastside Jean Swanson has likely come to know every single room occupancy hotel in that neighbourhood and then some.
For generations SRO’s have been the housing of last resort for the poorest of the poor; the aged, drug addicted and the disabled. They are one step away from shelters or the street. Many if not most of them rely on the province’s paltry social assistance housing allowance of $375 a month to pay the rent.
That is why Swanson’s description of one such hotel, The Clifton on Granville, is so stunning. “It is”, she says “the most disgustingly maintained place I have been in in the past five years.”
It is also the most recent example of what has become known as a “renoviction”; owners evict tenants then renovate the building and jack up the rents beyond the reach of those who were kicked out.
The Clifton has not escaped the notice of city hall. In a report to council last summer written by the city’s assistant deputy of inspections Carli Edwards, councillors learned that the property was “ranked as the second worst property on the city’s rental database with 105 violations (25 fire, four building, 16 electrical and 61 standards of maintenance bylaw violations.”) At that time the registered owner of the hotel was a numbered company with three principal directors, Abolghasem Abdollahi, Zohreh Fazl-Mashhadi and Yahya Nickpour.
The hotel has 73 sleeping units, many of which stand empty.
Attempts by city staff to work with the owners proved fruitless. In light of the owners’ intransigence, staff was proposing court action.
That threat seemed to move the owners.
In her report Edwards said: “although these violations are serious, staff feels the building should not be evacuated at this time.”
The month before the matter came before council, architect David Mah received a building permit in the name of the property owners.
According to Edwards, correspondence from Mah to the city included a commitment not to evict the tenants.
One other thing: since the council hearing last year, one director of the Clifton Hotel, Abdollahi, bought his two colleagues out and is now the sole owner of the building. It is one of a number he owns including The Lion and The Chelsea that are among the worst maintained in the city.
Meanwhile, the building has continued to deteriorate until it has reached the “disgustingly maintained” state Jean Swanson observed.
So in spite of architect’s commitment and staff’s observation about no need to evict, the owner Abdollahi used the Residential Tenancy Act (RTA) to evict the 45 tenants by the end of next month. He says the repairs required could not take place while they were there.
Effectively it means that while the tenant was there, under the RTA, rents could only go up for his room a maximum of 4 percent a year.
Once they are gone and the renovations are done, the owner can charge whatever the market will bear. And Abolghasem told 24 Hours as much last week: “What do you expect? I’m not a charity.”
The city says it is helpless in this situation even though it could have used its own Standards of Maintenance bylaw to make the repairs and charge the owner.
Instead Edwards says, correctly, it can’t withdraw the building permit because the Vancouver building bylaw under which the permit was given is mute on the matter of tenancy.
City council, in the person of Vision Vancouver Coun. Kerry Jang, lays much of the cause for this dilemma at the feet of the province; he says it has repeatedly refused to amend the Residential Tenancy Act to protect levels of rent charged by SROs by tying the rent to the room and not the tenant. There is also the point that the $375 housing allowance hasn’t moved up for seven years. Meanwhile about 150 SROs stand empty in the city while various landlords bide their time to have their own renovictions.
As for the 45 people who are about to be out on the street and drive up the homeless numbers in the city, they are filing a complaint with the Residential Tenancy Branch arguing their eviction is illegal. Good luck.
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