The Downtown Eastside Single Room Occupancy Collaborative is gaining traction in Vancouver with recently helping tenants of the Lion Hotel win a major victory — the landlord was ordered to pay a fee to all the complainants for three months of no heat and hot water.
Victories like this are just one aspect for the collaborative, which works with residents of single-occupancy hotels to advocate for their housing rights and improve conditions within these hotels. The collaborative is currently running campaigns at five Downtown Eastside single room occupancies (SROs).
“We do a lot of grassroots organizing to improve the habitability of SRO hotels,” said Marina Classen, a fifth-year interdisciplinary studies student at UBC involved with the group. “We’re primarily focusing on privately owned SRO buildings … because if they’re not owned by a community organization or the province or city, then there’s a lot of malpractice and exploitation that goes on.”
The Lion Hotel is one example of a single room occupancy building in the Downtown Eastside that has faced severe criticism for its treatment of tenants. An inspection last year found numerous deficiencies with the building other than the lack of heat and water, which itself lasted for several weeks.
For the SRO Collaborative, the most important aspect of a campaign advocating on behalf of the rights of tenants — such as those in the Lion Hotel — is to ensure that tenants are involved in the advocacy process.
“A huge part of our membership is made up of Downtown Eastside tenants from the SROs,” explained Classen. “We’ll choose a tenant in the building that’s interested in being part of organizing with the collaborative, reaching out to the rest of their building and being a source of contact for us within the building.”
Although it is still focusing on SRO residents, the group has also started a new project called Youth for Chinese Seniors, which provides outreach services, translation and advocacy for Chinese seniors living in the Downtown Eastside.
“[In] the Downtown Eastside, there’s a lot of services, but the majority of them are in English so they don’t serve the Chinese seniors that live in the neighbourhood,” said Chanel Ly, an outreach worker with the project.
Advocating for Chinese seniors is often different from the other advocacy work that the SRO collaborative does, as many of these seniors feel voiceless in the Downtown Eastside community.
“The seniors know that they are being targeted because that they are old and Asian. A lot of tension comes from the assumption that these seniors are already taken care of, that they don’t need access to food and so they’re taking our resources. This comes from this mentality that Chinese seniors are foreigners and are not part of the Downtown Eastside,” said Ly.
The collaborative has been coming up with unique ways to deal with this isolation and to give the rest of the community opportunities to connect with these seniors.
“[We had an event] called Untold Stories … where [we] had seniors come in who were Mandarin-speaking, Cantonese-speaking or English-speaking, and they came in to talk about their experiences of living in the area,” said Mary Chen, a third-year UBC creative writing major who works with the Mandarin-speaking seniors through the group. “[The event was] to have their voices heard when often their voices aren’t heard in the community.”