‘It’s terrible’: No running water or heat for six weeks in DTES apartments, residents report

After the water in his home on the edge of Vancouver’s Chinatown stopped working in mid-September, Nicholas Umphrey said he started taking a 10-litre jug to the neighbourhood grocery store to fill. Some of his neighbours turned to a tap at nearby Andy Livingstone Park.

Umphrey and his fellow tenants at the West Hotel then lugged their buckets of water back to the century-old, eight-storey building so they could wash their hands, or manually fill the toilet tanks to flush. They had to take the stairs each time because the elevator has been out of service for more than two years.

“Luckily I’m able to walk, I’m more mobile than some of the tenants living there. A lot of tenants there are on disability,” said Umphrey, who has since moved out of the hotel and into another SRO not far away. “These are citizens living without basic necessities. It’s abhorrent. It’s terrible.”

The West is a 98-unit single-room occupancy hotel, or SRO, that has long provided homes for low-income residents. On Oct. 16, the landlord — a family that has owned and operated SROs in and around the Downtown Eastside for decades — entered into a settlement agreement with B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Branch, committing to restoring water service to all floors before Oct. 26.

As of Nov. 6, that has not happened, tenants’ advocates say.

Property records show the West Hotel is owned by a numbered corporation directed by Mario Laudisio and Antonietta Maria Laudisio, who acquired the property, along with two other nearby Downtown Eastside SROs, in February from the properties’ previous longtime owner Christopher Wall.

The Laudisio family has long owned and operated SROs in the Downtown Eastside and elsewhere in Vancouver. In an emailed statement this week, Giuseppe Laudisio said: “We purchased the property in the spring. We are experienced landlords, the property had a lot of deferred maintenance. Once we got in there, it was worse than originally thought/seen. We are and have been attending to all necessary repairs with full dispatch.”

Laudisio declined to answer questions about whether water service had been restored, as per the tenancy branch settlement deadline, or the heat was now working, but said: “The issues predate our purchase in the spring. We have no further comment.”

The West tenants had a different perspective, Umphrey says. “The consensus (among residents) was that we had, basically, a good standard of living for a long time, and it hadn’t changed for years and years, and all of a sudden … this place just went downhill real quick.”

Some Downtown Eastside service providers say they have noticed an increase in complaints about the West since the change in ownership in February.

“This has come to our attention over the last few months, where previously it hadn’t been,” said Sarah Marsden of First United.

“And I can definitely say there is no evidence of any repair or of any of these issues being addressed. … And when it’s something like heat or something like water, it’s not acceptable to let that drag on,” said Marsden, director of systems change and legal for the non-profit service provider that works with low-income tenants in the Downtown Eastside.