Pete McMartin
Sun
A roof leaks. Rainwater floods apartments. Ceilings sag, water fills light bulbs and electrical outlets.
City inspectors rush to the scene. It is an old apartment building, owned by landlords famous, or infamous, for the decrepitude of their properties. The inspectors immediately shut the building down.
Eighty-one people, most of them aboriginal, many of them single mothers and their children, all of them poor, are evacuated immediately. The Not Safe To Occupy order officially states the reason for evacuation as Electrical Shock Hazard, but that, laughably, is more paperwork than anything. More precisely, the reason could have been Danger of Being Buried Alive Hazard. Sheets of gyproc fall off ceilings and walls as people are being rushed out of the building.
A hurriedly thrown-together committee of city and provincial officials rush about finding temporary housing for the 81 evacuees. They are put up in hotels. Some, in social assistance programs, are guaranteed to have their rents paid by the provincial government at least until the end of the month. Others have until Thursday. All of them, sooner or later, will be out of luck if they do not find a place to live.
City officials work day and night trying to find the evacuees homes. This proves to be excruciatingly difficult work in a city with a vacancy rate approaching zero. The expense to the city and provincial government mounts incalculably, while the building owner goes to ground.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Well, just about everything. The building, a 50-unit three-storey wood-frame building at 2131 Pandora, was owned by Paul Sahota, whose family owns several of the seediest hotels in the Downtown Eastside and several other apartment buildings. You would be hard-pressed to find a news story about the Sahotas without the phrase “slum landlords” in it. Many of those stories also point out, deliciously, that the Sahotas live in Shaughnessy while their tenants live in squalor.
The implication of that contrast is fairly obvious, and the inference one might draw from reading it is that the city and province should come down on the Sahotas hard. The public, naturally, wonders why they haven’t before.
But stories like this have been around for years, as have slum landlords. Squalor persists. And so does the public wonderment about why anything isn’t being done to end it.
Which is not quite the truth. Judy Graves, the city’s social housing and homelessness advocate, has, since the 1990s, conducted an annual survey of low-cost housing, visiting almost 200 buildings every year. The condition of single-occupancy rooms and low-cost residential apartments has improved substantially in the last decade, Graves said.
“The difference between, say, the nearby Aspen Hotel, which is an older building, and something like the Cobalt Hotel (owned by the Sahotas), is the difference between heaven and hell.”
The question, of course, is, why should the public have to endure any hell at all? Why aren’t city bylaw inspectors putting an end to all of the squalor?
Well, that question is easier to ask than answer. For one thing, the city and its inspectors are caught in something of a Catch-22.
If they come down hard on a landlord, the landlord can play hard right back. They can say, okay, if you want me to make all these expensive improvements, I’ll just shut the building down and throw the tenants out on the street. In a tight housing market and the rabidly politicized atmosphere of the Downtown Eastside, this is the last thing the city wants. So inspectors are sometimes walking a fine line between maintaining the bylaws and preserving a housing pool for the poor. Also, inspectors know that the more expensive the improvements they demand, the more likely the cost of them being passed along to the tenant.
There are other factors. Since the city has a policy of not accepting anonymous complaints for building infractions, tenants who are poor and afraid of losing their homes are afraid to complain. Barb Windsor, the city’s deputy chief licence inspector, said she pulled the file on the Sahota building and only had a couple of complaints from tenants. And sometimes, Windsor said, it is the tenants themselves causing the need for repair. (Windsor alluded to a police investigation underway at the Sahota building about a hole possibly cut in the roof.)
“Is it a perfect situation? No,” Windsor said. “Is every owner and tenant perfect? No.
“I don’t know what to say. It isn’t perfect. But I honestly think our inspectors do a good job.”
On the other hand, if the ceilings of that apartment building came down and people were killed underneath falling debris, this conversation would be completely different.
And there is talk of more onus being put on the landlords. Vision Coun. Tim Stevenson, for one, wants to see a better fining system in place, with higher fines. He also like to see landlords who are repeat offenders have to pay for city inspections.
“We also have to find a way of fining [the landlord] for the cost of accommodation for the people evicted. Because it’s no cost to him while the city and provincial governments are having to pay for it.”
Not a bad idea. We might consider it before the roof falls in again and somebody dies.
© The Vancouver Sun 2007