Hotel is no place like home

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/02/2024 (576 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Bravo to Rebecca Chambers for her deeply personal article (Shuttered Sherbrook cause for celebration on West Broadway, Feb. 5) which can be summed up as a blunt “good riddance” to the Sherbrook Hotel. For far too long, Winnipeg has allowed such hotels to backstop a broken housing market by providing ramshackle housing to those most vulnerable.

Her article raises the question as to whether it is time to serve final notice that housing quality and community standards are a matter of right. We must also ask ourselves what can be done to ensure housing is appropriate for all persons and the wider community and whether hotels play any part?

Winnipeg remains one of a few North American cities that continue to rely on a high number of “single room occupancy” hotels (SROs) in its mix of affordable housing. While many of Winnipeg’s SROs remain concentrated in the downtown and inner city (and primarily on Main Street), we have seen increasing conversions of hotels in many parts of the city. In a 2020 count of hotels that rented monthly, we estimated that there could have once been as many as 40 hotels scattered in all parts of the city.

More recently, we also demolished and lost a vast number of SROs including the burning of the Windsor Hotel, the demolishing of the St. Regis, the Osborne Village Inn and the Pembina hotel to name a few. Last summer we also witnessed several rallies and calls for the closure of the Manwin hotel that made the pages of the Free Press as protesters demanded action to address ongoing issues.

For the past 20 years, I have kept a handwritten letter from a former owner of the Bell Hotel near my desk.

This letter is a constant reminder of work we did in 2004 to assess SROs in Winnipeg. The letter spoke to the challenges and observations of Winnipeg’s early housing and addictions crisis. John, as I will refer to him, owned and operated the hotel for a long time.

During our work, we classified the Bell’s appearance as deplorable, its rooms uninhabitable and its amenities as nonexistent, but somewhere in John’s heart, he felt a kinship to the population who in his words “had nowhere else to go in a broken system.” But make no mistake, John exploited the situation and profited off misery in an industry built and made from abject poverty and desperation.

For SROs to remain viable, there are three critical options that may open the door to better standards and outcomes.

The first option is a stringent enforcement of codes and standards to ensure any building used for rental is safe, clean and habitable.

The reality is many SRO hotels fail to provide adequate housing. Enforcement must be swift with zoning and bylaw enhancements to ensure life and wellbeing is at the forefront. This must include access to funding to renovate buildings and bring standards up to a level that is acceptable.

This type of measure would allow private sector owners to rehabilitate older hotels and make them a slightly better alternative. This will result in closures but this must not deter effort to improve overall housing standards.

The second option is the conversion to more functional apartment style, with the Bell Hotel serving as an example of how a building can be adapted and changed to provide smaller compact units that embed opportunities for supports and services while removing liquor sales and beverage rooms. We call this supportive or even transitional housing.

It can be a permanent option or a stepping stone to housing once a person feels ready. An excellent example is the Skid Row Housing Trust in Los Angeles which has renovated and converted a significant number of hotels with good outcomes.

The third option is a hybrid approach that was used for the notorious Merchant Hotel on Selkirk Avenue. In this scenario, the community, working with the neighbourhood renewal corporation, acquired the hotel and completely redesigned the space for rental housing, education and community use. This model created a non-profit venture that ensures it supports community development. It also addressed the same concerns raised in West Broadway with respect to compatibility within the neighbourhood.

In my observations over the past 25 years, SROs once served a purpose when few options existed.

However, decades of neglect and time have accelerated the need to take a firm stand on housing quality, supports and community wellbeing. We must expect more.

I hope West Broadway finds a path forward to heal the damage done but perhaps the Merchant Corner success can be used as a model.

Jino Distasio is a professor of Geography at the University of Winnipeg and has studied SRO hotels and rooming housings in Canada and the United States for decades.