FRIDAY
March 27 2015 Vol. 106 No. 24
OPINION 11
Olson on jagged little pills PACIFIC SPIRIT 12
Celebrating Passover STATE OF THE ARTS 26
Killing in the name of puppets There’s more online at
vancourier.com WEEKEND EDITION
THE VOICE of VANCOUVER NEIGHBOURHOODS since 1908
Advocates raise alarm over DTES rent spike Report says nine hotels charging $700 a month for rent
Mike Howell
mhowell@vancourier.com
A Downtown Eastside advocacy group working on behalf of low-income residents in the community says a survey it did of rents at 68 single-room-occupancy hotels revealed at least nine that charge up to $700 a month for accommodation. The Carnegie Community Action Project says the findings are alarming and evidence of gentrification in a community where many residents receive only a $375 monthly allowance from the provincial government for housing. “Do you want to know why we have homelessness on the streets now?” said Jean Swanson of the Carnegie group at a press conference Wednesday at the Carnegie community centre. “Well, [single-room-occupancy hotels] are being gentrified. Lowincome residents are being evicted. Landlords are doing modest renos and seeking working people and students to replace the really low-income people.” Though the City of Vancouver and B.C. Housing operate hotels in the Downtown Eastside, the Carnegie group focused its research on privately owned
hotels. Group members posed as prospective tenants to collect rent data from desk clerks, managers and tenants. The findings were put together in a report, On The Brink: The DTES Housing Crisis. Of the nine hotels renting rooms for up to $700 month, which included the American Hotel, Alexander Court, Golden Crown, Grand Trunk and New Columbia, all had raised the rents by $100 or more over the 2013 rate, the report said. “Seven hundred [dollars] a month is almost twice what a person on welfare gets for rent and it’s $90 more than that person has for all their living expenses,” said Swanson, noting the $700 monthly rents applied to 445 rooms in the nine hotels, where tenants share washrooms and have no kitchen. Swanson noted the rent increases come as more than 700 new market rental units are being built in or near Chinatown, with only 11 social housing units among the mix. Wilson Liang, a member of the Chinatown Concern Group, said the community needs more housing for Chinese seniors, many of whom were playing cards in a room at the Carnegie during the press conference. Continued on page 6
Health Canada grants exemption to injection site
Mike Howell
mhowell@vancourier.com
Health Canada has granted Vancouver’s Insite supervised drug injection site an exemption to operate for another year, Vancouver Coastal Health announced in a statement Wednesday. But the city’s former drug policy coordinator is worried legislation passed by the Harper government this week in the House of Commons will make it difficult for more injection sites to open in Vancouver and across the country. “That’s the problem with all this,” said Donald Macpherson, the director of the
Canadian Drug Policy Coalition. “I know how much work it is to apply for one of those exemptions. So this is really a make-work project by the federal government for health authorities, community groups and provincial governments. It’s a lot of work.” The legislation passed in the House of Commons is known as the Respect for Communities Act. Health officials and harm reduction advocates described the bill as setting out an onerous list of criteria that makes opening another injection site in Canada very difficult, if not impossible. Continued on page 4
AIR JERWIN Churchill Bulldog Jerwin Ibit (No. 10) hangs in the air to avoid David Thompson Trojan Parm Hyare (No. 15) in the senior boys all-star basketball game at Sir Charles Tupper secondary March 25. In the eighth annual tilt, the West beat the East 98-97 in overtime. Read more on page 28. PHOTO DAN TOULGOET
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