Developers snap up Downtown Eastside

Vancouver, February 12
One in five open lodging house rooms in Vancouver have been sold or put up for sale since January 2006, according to new research by Pivot Legal Society.

More than half of the open rooms purchased were bought by groups or individuals identifiable through title searches as developers.

 “Our research with Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) shows that now, more than ever, City Council must send a strong message to property speculators that low-income buildings will not be converted to market housing until there is a real commitment from our senior levels of government to replace them with social housing,” says David Eby, lawyer with Pivot Legal Society. “Without this commitment, we will see the over 1,000 people who live in these rooms on our streets, and we simply can’t afford that.”

More than 385 of the rooms sold since January, 2006, have been purchased by Robert Wilson, the owner and developer of “33 Living,” a condominium project located beside the former Pender Hotel. The Pender Hotel is also owned by Wilson.  22 hotels have changed hands since January 2006, representing 1178 rooms, of which 1039 are still open and operating. An additional 10 hotels are currently for sale, with an average cost of over $60,000 per room, including the Roosevelt Hotel, which rents its bottom floor to Vancouver Coastal Health’s Health Contact Centre, a low-barrier medical clinic for Vancouver’s most marginalized residents. The building is for sale for $2.35 million dollars and is located at Main and Hastings.

“City council votes tomorrow on a moratorium on converting buildings to any use other than social housing,” said Eby. “With buildings that nobody ever imagined would sell to developers on the market and sold, this motion must pass to send everyone a signal that there will be no conversions without social housing.”

The Vancouver city council meeting, debate and vote on the moratorium takes place Tuesday, February 13 at 2:00 p.m.

Click here to see the full statistics (17 KB, 2 pages)  

Click here to see the full statistics and title search documents (1.3 M, 50 pages)