Vancouver’s SROs Are Changing Hands. And Tenants Are Being Pushed Out

A wave of single-room occupancy hotel foreclosures in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is sparking fears of mass evictions by the new owners and the loss of hundreds of housing units serving vulnerable renters.

And the situation is highlighting the failure to deliver on past promises to move the aging SRO buildings into provincial government ownership, leaving the vital low-income housing stock vulnerable to market pressures.

Since several of the largest SRO hotels in the neighbourhood changed hands earlier this year, tenants say they and their neighbours have experienced constant pressure to move out of their buildings. They say they’ve also faced maintenance problems that have led to elevators being out of service for extended periods.

“There's about 10 buildings affected, nine or 10 depending on how you count it, and at the West Hotel, it's the worst,” Ezra Bloom, a tenant organizer with the Downtown Eastside SRO Collaborative, told media at a press conference last week. The collaborative says that 57 out of 98 rooms at the West are now empty.

“The tenants are being systematically pushed out of the building. Some tenants are getting an eviction notice every month.... They offer long-term tenants money to leave every day.”

The collaborative, a tenant-based advocacy group for SRO residents, says it has tracked nine buildings that have been foreclosed on or are in foreclosure or receivership court processes.

Land title and business registry records show that three SROs — the West Hotel at 488 Carrall St., the Empress at 235 E. Hastings St. and the United Rooms at 139 E. Cordova St. — transferred ownership from Christopher Wall to Antonietta and Mario Laudisio in February.

Previous reporting in The Tyee warned that Wall’s extensive portfolio of SRO buildings was going through foreclosure or had been put into receivership. In addition to the Empress and the West, those Wall-owned buildings include the Laurel Apartments at 610 Alexander St., the York at 259 Powell St., the Arlington at 575 E. Pender St. and the Silver Avalon at 165 W. Pender St.

Wall did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Wendy Pedersen, founder of the SRO Collaborative, said she believes the foreclosures are happening because landlords “took double mortgages or mortgages that are now rolling over to high interest rates, and I think there's a bubble bursting, just like there is for the condos. There's a bubble bursting in the Downtown Eastside.”

Court records show the Persepolis Hotel at 351 Columbia St. and the Grand Union Hotel at 74 W. Hastings St., both owned by Yahya Nickpour, are also being foreclosed on.

In total, the nine hotels have 483 units of housing for low-income people, according to numbers collected by the SRO Collaborative. The tenant group is warning that if current tenants get pushed out of the buildings as new owners look for higher rent payers, hundreds of people could end up homeless.

Concerns about the Laudisios

The SRO Collaborative and the tenants they represent are particularly worried about the West, the Empress and the United Rooms being bought by the Laudisios.

The Laudisios are longtime SRO owners who also operate the Brandiz Hotel at 122 E. Hastings St., the Lucky Lodge at 134 Powell St. and the Vogue Hotel at 1060 Granville St.

The province’s land ownership transparency registry shows that Antonietta Laudisio holds an interest in a total of $97 million worth of properties, including the Vancouver SROs, a number of apartment buildings in northern B.C. towns and a four-bedroom house in West Vancouver worth $9 million. Another five-bedroom house in West Vancouver listed in corporate registry documents as the home address of Mario Laudisio is worth $2.7 million.

The Tyee contacted Antonietta Laudisio for comment for this story by phone and left letters at the West Hotel and a West Vancouver home, but did not hear back by publication time.

In 2005, the Lucky Lodge — also owned by the Laudisios at that time — was one of three SROs targeted by police in an undercover investigation that found widespread drug dealing, deplorable living conditions and welfare fraud. According to a 2006 article in the Province, the Laudisios were charged with fraud in 2005, “but the charges were dismissed three years later.”

In 2022, former city manager Paul Mochrie wrote a memo to mayor and council describing the Laudisios’ recent behaviour towards tenants of the Lucky Lodge.

“The owner and building manager have been open with City staff on their intent to change the tenant profile of this building, reporting to staff they intend to house ‘students’ in the building in the future, after light renovations that do not require permits,” Mochrie wrote.

He went on to say that staff had received information about a variety of tactics the landlords were allegedly using to get tenants to leave, including notices to relocate because of renovations; offers to pay tenants a lump sum to leave their rooms, sometimes accompanied by eviction notices; threats of door removal on currently tenanted rooms; and “harassment and intimidation.”

Mochrie noted that “at least one building tenant in their 70s has presented at the City’s Outreach Office today requesting assistance with rehousing due to a Notice to Relocate.” But, Mochrie said, the city does not have tools to assist tenants and was only able to refer them to the provincial Residential Tenancy Branch process, which adjudicates disputes between tenants and landlords.

In 2022, the Residential Tenancy Branch fined the Laudisios $3,500 because they refused to produce records about tenancies. The branch’s enforcement arm wanted the records as part of an investigation it was conducting, based on a complaint “alleging that the respondents may have seriously contravened the Act by attempting to serve invalid notices to end tenancy to multiple tenants at the rental property, and interfering with multiple tenants’ right to quiet enjoyment.”

Guy Lawson, 72, and Marlene McArthur, 74, have lived at the Empress since 2017, finding a home at the building after they were renovicted from an apartment in Surrey. Lawson is McArthur’s caregiver, and he’s renovated their small room to create a space that works for the two of them, with a loft bed for Lawson, a bathroom that accommodates McArthur’s mobility needs and a tiny kitchen area.

McArthur said that since the Laudisios bought the building, there have been several times when the elevator has been down for a number of days, causing her to miss medical appointments.

While Lawson and McArthur haven’t received a buyout offer, some of their neighbours have.

“I'm hearing that every day,” Lawson told The Tyee. “And some have been here for 10 years.”

Advocates plead, again, for the province to buy SROs

The SRO Collaborative is once again urging the provincial government to buy the remaining privately held SROs. It’s a solution that’s been considered and tried in the past: in 2020, Vancouver’s mayor and council voted on a plan to pursue getting $1 billion from the provincial and federal governments to buy 105 privately held SROs.

While the B.C. government had already bought a number of the aging hotels, and tried to buy more during the COVID-19 pandemic, some of those purchases came under scrutiny because BC Housing was purchasing them for more than their assessed value.

City of Vancouver staff say the city is still working with the provincial and federal governments on “stabilizing” the city’s stock of SROs and eventually converting or replacing them with modern housing, but did not give an update on the total number of SROs purchased or how much of the $1 billion had been secured since 2020.

Another major SRO revitalization is effectively on hold because of provincial funding cuts. In 2020, the city purchased the Balmoral and Regent hotels from the notorious Sahota family, after starting a process to expropriate the buildings. The Balmoral was torn down in 2024, but the lot still stands vacant because of provincial cuts to the Community Housing Fund.

“The city and province are in the process of identifying alternate funding sources prior to advancing the project further,” city staff told The Tyee.

BC Housing plans to convert the Regent Hotel to self-contained units. But the provincial housing agency is still waiting for city permits, Vancouver staff told The Tyee. The Regent continues to sit empty, just as it has since it was condemned in 2018.

Other projects are proceeding slowly: the Keefer Rooms, which has sat empty since a major fire in 2022, was purchased by the Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust and is now waiting for permits to allow renovation. And BC Housing and several non-profit organizations have recently completed a number of new buildings in the Downtown Eastside, including Bob & Michael’s Place at 32 W. Hastings St. and the United Church’s new building at 320 E. Hastings St.

When it comes to the SROs in foreclosure, the Ministry of Housing says it is “monitoring the situation,” but staff say the long-term solution is to continue to build modern housing that will replace the SROs.

The SRO Collaborative is warning that the province needs to act quickly to prevent the loss of affordable housing if the new owners of the distressed SROs push out existing tenants. Pedersen said each building has a unique community of tenants — many elderly or disabled — who help one another. Those community connections will be lost if tenants are pushed out, she said, and elderly tenants’ health is already being affected by the stressful situation.

“I see people in the street that used to live in the West, and the increases in the street homelessness as a result of this building closing will be felt by those of us on the frontlines of the community trying to help,” Pedersen said.

“And people will be wondering, ‘Why is the Downtown Eastside not getting better?’”