A small Downtown Eastside hotel run by a non-profit – a building that has never been on the list of the city’s worst hotels – is facing a dozen counts of failure to maintain its property and potentially tens of thousands of dollars in fines.
The operators of the Dodson Hotel, a 75-room, 100-year-old-plus building on East Hastings, say that even though private donors have put millions into the hotel to keep it functional, the city has decided that’s not enough.
“It’s quite frankly incomprehensible,” said Keith Wiebe, a co-founder of Anhart Community Housing Society, which he said has owned the hotel since 2013.
Before that, it was owned by an affiliated group called Community Builders Benevolence Group, now run by Mr. Wiebe’s daughter, where a group of philanthropists aimed to make the hotel a place that would create a sense of a safe community for its impoverished and sometimes fragile residents. Mr. Wiebe said he has tried to continue that.
He said Anhart has been working hard to maintain the building and has generally worked co-operatively with city staff about improvements that need to be done. But, he said, a new inspector and possibly new policies at the city, aimed at monitoring the area’s often problematic residential hotels, seems to have made the Dodson the first target.
The city’s summons to Anhart lists 12 violations, some of them extending over weeks last summer and fall, about failures to maintain the fire-protection system and the elevator. Others note failures on one day in October, the day of the annual inspection, on issues that ranged from not having a number on an apartment door to failure to maintain floors, stairs and walls in good repair. Any violation can carry a penalty of between $500 and $10,000 a day.
Mr. Wiebe said that means he faces potential penalties of between $500,000 and $10-million.
The City of Vancouver declined to comment on the Dodson case as the matter is before the courts. In general, however, the city said in a statement that court action is initiated after a process that includes an effort at voluntary compliance and later, an enforcement letter.
For a long time in Vancouver, staff tried to keep buildings open no matter what, rather than shutting them down for violations and forcing residents to find new housing.
Vancouver has taken an increasingly aggressive stand in trying to maintain living standards for the 4,000 people living in about 95 single-room-occupancy hotels in the Downtown Eastside, Gastown and Chinatown. In 2017 and 2018, the city closed two of the area’s most notorious hotels – the Balmoral and the Regent, owned by the Sahota family – after they racked up thousands of violations. It expropriated them in the fall of 2019. They’re still sitting empty.
Tenants at the West Hotel sued the building’s owners and the managers, which was Community Builders, after they failed to fix an elevator that was broken for months in 2015 and 2016. Community Builders eventually gave up the management, saying it couldn’t maintain safety because of the delays over the elevator issue.
Last November, council also approved a new policy that prohibits landlords of residential hotels from raising the rents beyond the usual provincial maximum when a tenant leaves and a new one moves in – a move expected to, if nothing else, prevent speculators from buying up single-room occupancy, or SRO, hotels, renovating them quickly, and renting them out for much more money.
The city is also pursuing a goal of trying to raise $1-billion to acquire all the private hotels and put them into public ownership.
In the meantime, a co-ordinated team of staff, with representatives from many departments, works on monitoring and inspecting the hotels, often targeting the worst-performing ones.
In the past, the Dodson has not appeared on any of the city’s worst-of lists.
But a long-time advocate for people living in the area’s residential hotels said that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems there that the city has decided to tackle.
“I don’t think there’s anything new or different going on there,” said Wendy Pedersen, director of the SRO Collaborative Society.
Mr. Wiebe is due in provincial court Tuesday, where he plans to plead not guilty to the charges of violations.
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Frances Bula