Powell Rooms SRO

Good morning, 

Nate with you today. They say there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen. While that might be a bit dramatic in this case, that’s how Thursday felt for this local reporter. 

There were a multitude of stories on our radar, all of which deserve attention. However, what we landed on is a story we’ve been working on over the past month, and we’re very excited to share it.

But don’t worry, we’ll do our best to cover all the other big news of the day in a can’t-miss agenda section, and we’re planning some follow-up coverage on a few of those items as well. 

Let’s get to it!

— Nate Lewis, Vancity Lookout

As always, you can send your tips, leads, and story ideas to Nate at [email protected].

PS - If you find this newsletter valuable, please consider forwarding it to your friends. New to the Lookout? Sign-up for free. 

WEATHER

Friday: 9 🌡️ 7 | 🌧️

Saturday: 11 🌡️ 8 | ☁️

Sunday: 9 🌡️ 8 | 🌧️

Monday: 11 🌡️ 6 | 🌧️

DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE

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

Read the story online here.

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. 

THE VANCOUVER NUMBER

40

The number of years that the SkyTrain has been in operation (as of yesterday). It was unveiled as part of the Expo 86 world fair on Dec. 11, 1985. Read more. [CBC]

THE AGENDA

😬 Hundreds of properties in the Fraser Valley, mostly in Abbotsford, are under evacuation order due to flooding after Wednesday’s atmospheric river, while a stretch of Highway 1 was closed as of Thursday night. Some lessons have been learned since the 2021 floods, while others have not. Read more. [The Tyee, CBC]

🏟️ The city and the Vancouver Whitecaps have announced they are in exclusive negotiations for the Whitecaps to build a soccer stadium and entertainment district on the site of the former Hastings Racecourse in East Vancouver. The announcement comes as the Whitecaps’ lease at BC Place is expiring this year and the team is up for sale, causing real concern that the ‘Caps could be moved out of town. Read more. [Vancity Lookout, Global]

🙎🏻 Sixteen mayors in Metro Vancouver are taking aim at “one-size-fits-all” provincial housing policies intended to increase housing supply, asking the province to repeal legislation around housing targets, transit-oriented development policies, and multi-unit housing requirements. NDP Housing Minister and former city councillor Christine Boyle said there will be no change in policy. Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim declined to sign the letter, along with four other mayors in the region. Read more. [Vancouver Sun] 

🇵🇭 The dream of a unifying cultural centre for the Filipino community in Vancouver has gone sideways, with infighting amongst Filipino organizations over who should lead the project. City Hall and Mable Elmore, a prominent Filipino MLA, are backing a proposal for a cultural centre and hotel development in Mount Pleasant. Meanwhile, other community groups, including Filipino BC, oppose the project, saying its relationship with Mayor Sim soured after publicly criticizing him. Read more. [CBC, Vancity Lookout]   

🪜 The city approved new building rules to allow for reduced staircases in medium-sized buildings in an effort to make building layouts more flexible. Read more. [COV]

💸 Small businesses in Mount Pleasant impacted by Broadway Subway construction are desperate for financial relief after the province announced a four-month road closure near Broadway and Main in early 2026. The province indicated it would not provide them with financial support, while Mayor Sim and city councillors showed up in support of the business owners at an event on Monday evening. Read more. [BIV]

🤔 ABC councillors voted to scrap a policy that required large development projects to source a small percentage of materials, goods, and services locally. Councillor Brian Montague, who altered a staff recommendation to pause the policy – getting rid of it instead – said he hadn’t read the city-commissioned study that found the policy “generated significant economic benefit,” while calling it an unnecessary barrier to new housing developments. Read more. [Vancouver Sun]

WEEKEND EVENT GUIDE

Little Women – Arts Club Theatre Company | Granville Island Stage, 1585 Johnston St. | Now–Jan. 4, various times | Fresh, inventive stage adaptation of Alcott’s classic following the March sisters’ coming-of-age journey | Tickets $29+

Magic of Gastown | Throughout Gastown | Now–Dec. 31, various times | Neighbourhood-wide holiday celebration with carolers, elves, window displays and free horse-drawn carriage rides | Free

Eastside Flea Holiday Markets | 1739 Venables St., Vancouver | Until Dec. 14, various times | Indoor–outdoor market with local makers, vintage finds, food trucks and festive seasonal drinks | Tickets $5

Make It! The Handmade Revolution | 2901 E Hastings St., Vancouver | Until Dec. 14, various times | Large handmade market featuring art, jewelry, treats, kids zone and festive entertainment | Tickets $15

Strathcona Holiday Market | 873 & 868 East Hastings | Dec. 13–14, 11 am–4 pm | Two-day East Vancouver market showcasing local artisans, vintage goods and handmade items for holiday gifting | Free

Wesbrook Village Holiday Market | Norman Mackenzie Square, 3378 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver | Until Dec. 21, Fri 3–9 pm; Sat–Sun 12–7 pm | Outdoor UBC village market with seasonal treats, artisan vendors and cozy holiday atmosphere | Free

Sing-Along Messiah with United Voices Choir | Kerrisdale Presbyterian Church, 2733 West 41st Ave. | Dec. 20, 2:30–5 pm | Community sing-along of Handel’s Messiah with professional orchestra and soloists| Tickets from $17.40

The Vancouver Chopin Society Christmas Concert 2025 | Fairview Baptist Church, 1708 West 16th Ave. | Dec. 22, 5:30–10 pm | Holiday concert featuring young musicians performing Chopin and seasonal works| Tickets $12.06

Holiday Shop at The Polygon Gallery | The Polygon Gallery, 101 Carrie Cates Ct. | Until Jan. 4, 10 am–5 pm; Thu until 9 pm | Gallery shop featuring unique artist-made gifts and weekly interactive activities for visitors | Free

Talib Kweli | Rickshaw Theatre, 254 E Hastings St. | Jan. 25, 7 pm | Brooklyn hip-hop icon performs a live 19+ show featuring top-tier lyricism and career-spanning tracks | Tickets $49.07

Submit your event and it could appear here and reach 28,000+ Vancouver locals

FOOD

While it’s situated in Vancouver’s hottest tourist destination, the city’s latest izakaya, Oku in Gastown is anything but a tourist trap. 

Read the review + subscribe to our free newsletter

PHOTO OF THE DAY

Checking in on PNE ampitheatre construction, supposed to be finished by early this summer, with the former Hastings Racecourse in the background.

COMMUNITY HIGHLIGHTS

• Some people think TransLink buses are too hot. Thoughts? [Vancouver is Awesome]

• Nardwuar was treated like the king he is while on a trip to London. [Straight]

• Vancouver restaurants are upping their approach to design. [Vancity Lookout]

• The Gargoyles of the Hotel Vancouver are truly gorgeous. [Reddit]

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VANCOUVER GUESSER

Nearly all of you knew that last week’s photo was Parker Street Studios in Strathcona, well done!

For this week’s guesser, can you tell me what (in)famous Vancouver nightclub this is? 

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