Under Vision Vancouver, Vancouver City Hall approved the use of legal injunctions for the first time against SRO Hotels in order to ensure housing quality for Vancouver’s most vulnerable citizens.
The movement to apply harsher penalties to landlords who fail to comply with basic maintenance bylaws stems from a long record of building violations. City inspectors have had difficulty gaining access to the building in order to inspect them, but when they did they found rats and bedbugs, holes in walls, non-working emergency equipment and broken bathrooms and fixtures.
"The list is just awful of what needs to be done," said Coun. Tim Stevenson, referring to the Wonder Rooms and Palace Hotel, which have a combined total of 71 rooms. "I don't think the judges are going to look very kindly on slum landlords who treat people who are the most vulnerable in our society this way."
Using legal injunctions to compel landlords to fix SRO buildings is a new policy, which Vision Vancouver introduced shortly after being elected and Council approved in March 2009. In cases where a landlord has repeatedly refused to meet basic health and safety regulations, staff can pursue a legal injunction, which is the final step the City can employ in order to keep the units open.
The 'threat' of court action alone has proven ineffective against these particular landlords, Stevenson stated. "We really want to signal to other slum landlords that we are very willing and able to use this tool and we're going to do it because we want to clean up these hotels."
Councillor Kerry Jang says the landlords have been told to fix the buildings up, but nothing has happened, so this is a last resort.
"Some of these landlords just refuse to do it. They ignore the tickets. They ignore the warnings. They don't care about the fines. The only way to get them to do it, to fix up the stairs and the elevators and things like that, is to take them to court and make them do it."
Residents from the hotels, led by the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) and the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Council, attended the Council meeting on the 30th at City Hall, asking for maximum fines to be levied against the owners. Many of the attendees reported a concern for personal safety and worries that speaking out against the landlord would result in their eviction.
Several hotel residents were seated in the upper chamber at City Hall, their identities concealed by a curtain in an unprecedented show of concern from the City as they listened to the residents.
Resources:
http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/cclerk/20110712/documents/motionb2.pdf
http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/cclerk/20110714/documents/csbu3.pdf
