Exclusive: Powell Rooms SRO set to become a unique model of community-owned housing

The Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust (DTES CLT) is in the final stage of acquiring Powell Rooms, a 23-unit single-room occupancy (SRO) apartment building and childcare facility near Powell Street and Princess Avenue, Vancity Lookout has learned. 

“It's definitely a really big step and really exciting,” DTES CLT executive director Andy Bond told Vancity Lookout. 

Norm Leech, who serves as president of both the Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust and Aboriginal Front Door Society, told Vancity Lookout that the function of a land trust is to take land off the private market. 

“The land trust puts the ownership of the land back into community hands, and there is a trust relationship not to sell the land. Once it's owned by the community, there's an agreement or an understanding that it will not be put back into the market,” Leech said, adding that the market doesn’t care about benefiting the community. 

It’s the DTES CLT’s first building acquisition since the not-for-profit group formally incorporated in early 2023. However, the idea of creating a land trust to protect low-income housing was something that neighbourhood organizations, like the SRO Collaborative, Aboriginal Front Door Society, and Powell Street Festival, had been working towards since 2021. 

The previous owner of Powell Rooms is Rob Harden, who bought the property in 2005 with his late wife, Deborah. “It's an age thing,” Harden, 71, told Vancity Lookout of his motivation to sell the building. 

“I enjoy the people. I enjoy going down there, chatting with some of the tenants. I really enjoy that. But it's also a bit of a grind,” Harden explained. He added he has no idea how he will feel when building ownership is officially transferred in January, but he hopes to stay in touch with the longtime tenants. 

Harden kept rents deeply affordable over the years. It’s on the less expensive side for a privately-owned SRO, with the highest rent at $550 and most tenants paying under $500 per month. That makes it the most affordable market housing in the whole city, according to Bond. 

It’s a place where tenants tend to stay put. At least five or six people have been living at Powell Rooms for the entire 20-year period that Harden owned the building, and only one person has ever left voluntarily, he said.  

“I think it's one of the most clean and clear examples of why there needs to be some effort to buy these [private SROs],” Bond said. “It's 23 units at this low, low rate and there's nowhere else for these people to go.”

“I think they recognize it's a fairly safe place,” Harden said of the tenants, explaining that the building doesn’t have any sort of check-in or security desk and tenants and visitors can come and go as they please, with a live-in building manager who looks after day-to-day issues. 

That sort of setup really appealed to the land trust. Bond, who previously worked in the Downtown Eastside for over 20 years in frontline and leadership roles at PHS Community Services, pointed out that a lot of tenants don’t want or need the higher levels of support offered in SROs owned by government and operated by non-profits like PHS. 

“It's expensive, and we think that there is a different way that SROs can be utilized … trying to run them on a much leaner budget, for people that just don't need a lot of support and are able to live more independently,” Bond said, explaining that the plan for Powell Rooms is for the current live-in building manager to stay on, while the SRO Collaborative will provide “light supports” to tenants. 

“The land trust is really not trying to become an operator intentionally. I want to focus on acquisition, stewarding, renovation, capital upgrades, and redevelopment,” Bond said, adding that Powell Rooms definitely needs some TLC. 

The land trust has about 85 per cent of the funds it needs for the acquisition and all the renovations, Bond said. The total cost comes in around $2.5 million, with the land trust receiving a $1 million grant from a federal government initiative called Reaching Home, about $230,000 from a city grant for upgrading SROs, as well as philanthropic donations.

Community childcare 

Around 2014, a charity called Urban Promise got in touch with Deborah Harden, looking to open a community childcare centre in Vancouver. Called Promise Vancouver, the childcare operator found a home on the ground-floor unit of Powell Rooms. 

Promise offers after-school, summer, and outdoor education programs for children of low-income families living in the Downtown Eastside. While Promise charges $20 per session, it also offers financial aid programs, with priority given to local families in financial need.  

“They do a fabulous job,” Harden. “Kids enjoy it. They also hire young people to work in their programs with them … they're quite instrumental.”

Harden has had “a deal” with Promise to rent the space at a subsidized rate, and is now offering to pay the next year of its rent as building ownership transfers over to the land trust. 

“They do wonderful programming. I've seen they've done some stuff with Indigenous Nations and bringing them there for different learning activities,” Bond said, adding that the land trust wants to maintain Promise as a tenant. 

A unique governance model

The Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust has put an emphasis on creating a decolonized community governance structure, with majority Indigenous leadership on its board.   

“We structured this land trust as a decolonized approach to relationship with land, which isn't based on property. It's based on relationship, understanding that the land is our relative, our ancestor, our first grandmother,” Leech explained.

“We need to honour that and repay that by taking care of, and managing, and using in a good way. And that does not include profiting, exploiting, destroying, polluting, buying and selling,” he added. 

Leech has been “instrumental in our governance formation, and a lot of our ideas around decolonization,” Bond said, while recognizing the land trust is still “using colonized tools to try and make things better for the tenants.”

The land trust also has a sub-committee made up of elders and SRO tenants from the community who meet monthly to give input and make decisions on everything from prospective building acquisitions to the furnishings or washroom layout in a building undergoing renovations. 

“These meetings have really become magical. Like in the earlier days, it was hard to even have the meeting … [but now] it's almost grown into this family unit,” Bond said. 

“We're really excited about the Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust,” Kabir Madan with the Carnegie Housing Project (CHP) told Vancity Lookout. 

The land trust “presents itself as a really good alternative vision for affordable housing in the Downtown Eastside,” Madan said, compared to the city’s current proposal to dramatically shift zoning rules in the area in favour of majority market housing, which CHP has been organizing against. 

The community is really excited about the land trust too. “Everybody we talk to, people know about the land trust, they know what’s happening. And that's really down to the team that is organizing around this, and the board as well,” Madan said.

Viewed strictly by the numbers, the DTES CLT’s acquisition of Powell Rooms is small potatoes. It’s not a big, flashy new building with hundreds of units or something that’s going to change the neighbourhood fundamentally. The change of hands might not even be noticeable to a neighbour or passerby. 

But at the same time, it represents significant movement in the status quo of how deeply affordable housing is preserved and managed in a neighbourhood where change is constantly promised but infrequently delivered.