Rich slumlords keep tenants in squalor

Pete McMartin, Vancouver Sun
Published: Tuesday, October 23, 2007

A roof leaks. Rainwater floods apartments. Ceilings sag, water fills light bulbs and electrical outlets.

City inspectors rush to the scene. It is an old apartment building, owned by landlords famous, or infamous, for the decrepitude of their properties. The inspectors immediately shut the building down.

Eighty-one people, most of them aboriginal, many of them single mothers and their children, all of them poor, are evacuated immediately. The Not Safe To Occupy order officially states the reason for evacuation as Electrical Shock Hazard, but that, laughably, is more paperwork than anything. More precisely, the reason could have been Danger of Being Buried Alive Hazard. Sheets of gyproc fall off ceilings and walls as people are being rushed out of the building.

A hurriedly thrown-together committee of city and provincial officials rush about finding temporary housing for the 81 evacuees. They are put up in hotels. Some, in social assistance programs, are guaranteed to have their rents paid by the provincial government at least until the end of the month. Others have until Thursday. All of them, sooner or later, will be out of luck if they do not find a place to live.

City officials work day and night trying to find the evacuees homes. This proves to be excruciatingly difficult work in a city with a vacancy rate approaching zero. The expense to the city and provincial government mounts incalculably, while the building owner goes to ground.

What's wrong with this picture?

Well, just about everything. The building, a 50-unit three-storey wood-frame building at 2131 Pandora, was owned by Paul Sahota, whose family owns several of the seediest hotels in the Downtown Eastside and several other apartment buildings. You would be hard-pressed to find a news story about the Sahotas without the phrase "slum landlords" in it. Many of those stories also point out, deliciously, that the Sahotas live in Shaughnessy while their tenants live in squalor.

The implication of that contrast is fairly obvious, and the inference one might draw from reading it is that the city and province should come down on the Sahotas hard. The public, naturally, wonders why they haven't before.

But stories like this have been around for years, as have slum landlords. Squalor persists. And so does the public wonderment about why anything isn't being done to end it.

Which is not quite the truth. Judy Graves, the city's social housing and homelessness advocate, has, since the 1990s, conducted an annual survey of low-cost housing, visiting almost 200 buildings every year. The condition of single-occupancy rooms and low-cost residential apartments has improved substantially in the last decade, Graves said.

"The difference between, say, the nearby Aspen Hotel, which is an older building, and something like the Cobalt Hotel (owned by the Sahotas), is the difference between heaven and hell."

The question, of course, is, why should the public have to endure any hell at all? Why aren't city bylaw inspectors putting an end to all of the squalor?

Read the rest here.