While the province tries to find new homes for Granville SRO residents, the fundamental problem is there are not enough places for everyone to go. Now, advocates warn that a convergence of factors threatens to lead to a major surge in homelessness
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There are many people worried right now about Vancouver’s single-room occupancy hotels, but for different reasons.
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Municipal politicians and downtown business interests are exasperated that the provincial government isn’t moving faster to empty three single-room occupancy, or SRO, buildings in the Granville Entertainment District.
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The province says it can’t shut down the buildings without appropriate alternatives for the tenants. But progress on building new social housing has not kept pace with demand.
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A recent flurry of real estate transactions involving privately owned SRO buildings has advocates raising alarms that hundreds of tenants could be at risk of displacement.
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This convergence of factors threatens to lead to a major surge in homelessness, said longtime housing advocate Wendy Pedersen.
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“We’re worried it’s going to double in the next little while. We’re at 3,000 homeless (people in Vancouver), and we could be at 6,000 homeless pretty quickly,” said Pedersen, who is executive-director of the Downtown Eastside SRO Collaborative, a local non-profit. “It’s a slow-motion train wreck. I can see it happening.
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“It will get worse.”
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Last month, Pedersen and her colleagues at the SRO Collaborative issued a news release warning a series of foreclosures and court-ordered sales of SRO buildings could put hundreds of low-income residents at risk of displacement and, potentially, homelessness.
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After one Downtown Eastside SRO building changed hands earlier this year, the new landlord started pressuring tenants to accept cash payments and move out, Pedersen said. Most of that building’s rooms are empty today, and she believes the landlords plan to do minor renovations and rent the rooms to new tenants. Some of the previous tenants, she said, are now on the street.
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The Collaborative counts at least eight other Downtown Eastside SRO buildings, totalling more than 350 rooms, that were recently in foreclosure or expected to be soon. They worry that longtime tenants could be pushed out of those buildings, with nowhere to go but shelters or the streets.
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Pedersen says the province should step in and buy the buildings to preserve them as social housing — as the province did with a Chinatown SRO in 2023 — before other private landlords acquire them.
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Meanwhile, across the downtown peninsula, the province is emptying three existing SRO buildings in the Granville Entertainment District — but not as fast as some people want.
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In recent years, Granville business owners have increasingly blamed the three publicly owned SRO buildings in the entertainment district for street disorder and crime, and after Mayor Ken Sim and his ABC council colleagues publicly rallied to their cause last year, the province agreed in March to relocate all 280 residents.
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The province said last November that the first of the three buildings, a former tourist hotel purchased by the province during COVID and converted into social housing, was expected to be emptied by June 2026. B.C. Housing worked with residents of the building, called the Luugat, to move many of them into new homes well before that deadline. But as of mid-August, a single resident remained.
