Urgent action request: Piccadily Hotel residents facing eviction
This just came into my inbox, and sounds urgent enough that I wanted to pass it along:
DTES Housing and Homelessness Action: Piccadilly Hotel Eviction - write a letter by Tuesday! CC it to CCAP [the Carnegie Community Action Project] (wpederson@look.ca) for our files:
Bad news. The Piccadilly Hotel will evict its tenants this coming Wednesday, February 28, 2007. City inspectors say it's not up to code and it needs to shut down because the owner is not fixing it up. This is the perfect time for the City to use its bylaws to protect the last housing before homelessness.
Please email city councillors and ask them to do the repairs. Council voted to look for a test case for the Standards of Maintenance Bylaw in February 2007 that lets them pay for hotel repairs and bill the owner. The City could also buy this hotel. In 2005, Council voted unanimously to support the DTES Housing Plan which says the City will buy 1 hotel a year. Sam Sullivan and Peter Ladner voted for this plan then. In February 2007, council agreed to look for a hotel to buy. So far, not one hotel has been purchased. At the February meeting, council blamed the Province for causing homelessness by not increasing Welfare rates. Council minimized their own power to help. But small actions to save existing housing will make a big difference. Buy hotels, fix them up and stop creating homelessness. We must continue to hold them to account.
Five minutes to write a quick letter with your name and address signed. This pressure works! We delivered 100 letters to mayor and councilors in February for the SRA (SRO) Bylaw meeting. CCAP and other community groups pressured them relentlessly with action, extensive media coverage and presence at council meetings. We won the promise of city councilors not to allow conversion or demolition of SROs. Let's keep the pressure on.
sam.sullivan@vancouver.ca
clranton@vancouver.ca
clrlander@vancouver.ca
clrdeal@vancouver.ca
clrlouie@vancouver.ca
clrlee@vancouver.ca
clrcadman@vancouver.ca
clrball@vancouver.ca
clrchow@vancouver.ca
clrstevenson@vancouver.ca
clrcapri@vancouver.ca
Backgrounder/press release from Pivot Legal Society:
City moves to close another SRO, Pivot calls for use of initiative approved yesterday
For immediate release - February 16, 2007
Vancouver - The City of Vancouver is moving to close another low-income single room occupancy building, this time the Picadilly Hotel, also known as the Pender Place Hotel, located at 622 West Pender Street. A notice to tenants from the City of Vancouver tells the building's occupants that if the owners fail to remedy deficiencies in the building by February 28, 2007, the building will have to be vacated. The Picadilly has 39 rooms, 12 of which are currently occupied by low-income residents at high risk of homelessness.
The remainder of the rooms remain empty because welfare has refused to issue cheques for tenants who wish to rent those rooms. "The twelve tenants have been given 19 days notice of their potential eviction," says David Eby, lawyer with the Pivot Legal Society. "While this is an improvement on the half hour eviction notice the Burns Block residents received, it is hardly the approach that we want the City to take in this type of situation."
Yesterday evening, Vancouver's city council instructed staff to identify a "test case" low-income building for use of the Standards of Maintenance By-law. This by-law permits City officials to enter residential buildings and make repairs to ensure the safety of tenants, and then bill those repairs back to the owner of the building. A 1990 decision of the B.C. Supreme Court called Carline Holdings v. City of Vancouver determined that the City's powers under this by-law are well founded in the Vancouver Charter, refuting a defendant's argument that the by-law only permitted "cosmetic" repairs.
"The timing is perfect for the Picadilly to be the City of Vancouver's building maintenance test case," said Eby. "Instead of punishing the tenants by sending them out into the street, the City could punish the owner for letting this building fall into such disrepair by making the necessary repairs to ensure tenant safety and sending the owner a bill. It's a win win situation: the tenants stay housed and the building is improved at no cost to the city."
The tenants have been advised by the Notice to contact the Tenant Assistant Program of the City of Vancouver for assistance relocating. Eby says that this is no remedy at all. "The Burns Block residents were supposedly offered relocation as well, but several of my clients from that building were homeless for periods of days, weeks or months. The one tenant who was assisted was homeless for two days first. The rest had to find their own housing, and those that are housed now live in even worse buildings. At least one former Burns Block resident is still homeless."
The Burns Block building, which was closed by the city in March of 2006, would have been another perfect candidate for the new initiative. Unfortunately, instead of making the minimum necessary repairs and billing the owner, the City closed the building, sending the 18 residents from that building into the street with half an hour's notice. The building is now up for auction and will be sold on March 1, 2007, the day after the scheduled closure of the Picadilly.
