North Star Hotel squatted for housing in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

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North Star Hotel squatted for housing in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

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At 4:30 (PST) one hundred and fifty housing activists turned out to open a squatted building in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside at 5 West Hastings Street. The North Star Hotel had been sitting empty since 1999 since it was ordered shut down by Vancouver City Council.

The Anti-Poverty Committee (APC) squat could provide homes for 30 local residents in a city where hundreds sleep outside each night. APC supporters chanted "Homes Not Games" and are asking the City of Vancouver to purchase the building for housing, rather than spending money on hosting the 2010 Olympics. Large 30 foot banners were unfurled from the top floor protesting the Olympics Games
and the lack of affordable housing.

With the Games fast approaching, and a housing and public health
crisis continuing, there is community pressure on governments to house the homeless. Many low income residents have been forced out of hotels recently closed or converted – with 300 low-income people being evicted since June 2005.

According to a City of Vancouver report from December 1999, the North Star Hotel had been shut down due to the landlord permitting prostitution, drug trafficking, and the lack of maintenance, sanitary and fire safety standards being met.

In 2004 the Hotel's owner had been courting a local non-profit organization, Atira Women's Resource Society, to redevelop the building for women's housing. The owner would have handed over the property title to the society or lease it to the group for $1 a year over several years. But for a variety of reasons, the owner soon lost interest. The owner would have benefited by receiving valuable heritage density bonuses once the 1890s building was restored. Heritage density bonuses can be sold to permit other projects in the city to have more floor space than would normally be allowed. Recently, the adjacent building at 1 West Hastings, being developed by the Portland Hotel Society, was allocated $3 million in heritage density bonuses from the City.

Pivot Legal Society, which advocates for poor people's legal rights states: "These SRO buildings are being destroyed or converted to
tourist use at a rate four times higher than that expected by City
Council. While some of these rooms have been scheduled to be replaced by new construction, most of these living spaces will never be recovered."

Local housing critics gathering at today's protest also criticized the City's lack of enforcement of housing standards for poor people, and allowing buildings to gradually become inhabitable and then gentrified.

More than 20 Vancouver police officers were on hand photographing
and videotaping the opening of the squat. The high profile site is strategically located in the heart of the neighbourhood which has seen
the homelessness rate double since 2002.

http://apc.resist.ca

http://www.pivotlegal.org/Issues/housing.htm