NEWS: Senior renters fleeing West End

By Jessica Barrett | 08/18/2010

Ervin Jay points to his 10th-floor West End apartment, which for the past six weeks has been accessible only by stairs, due to the building’s broken elevator. Credit: Doug Shanks

On paper, Marc Fiebig and Ervin Jay’s West End penthouse apartment is a steal. The 1,200-square-foot, 10th-floor rental unit on Pendrell Street boasts two bedrooms, dark hardwood floors, and an expansive wraparound patio where the roommates and their cats enjoy sweeping neighbourhood vistas. The rent is relatively cheap at $1,400 a month.

But they have, in other ways, paid a steep price to remain in the home where Fiebig has lived for seven years and Jay for four. The Hyperion, the 50-year-old building that houses their unit, is constantly suffering from the results of decades of neglect, they say, causing minor inconveniences at the best of times and holding them hostage at the worst.

This summer has definitely been the worst.

Since July 4, Fiebig and Jay report, the building’s elevator — which has been subject to breakdowns for years — has functioned for only approximately three days, an assertion confirmed by other tenants. Without it, Fiebig, who has survived multiple heart attacks and has early onset Parkinson’s disease, has been essentially housebound.

“Going down the steps is a real treasure for me,” says Fiebig, with a healthy dose of sarcasm. The 63-year-old says his poor depth perception combined with heart and lung problems make coming and going from the building a Herculean task — one he chooses to tackle only once a week or so. “I try to make all my doctor’s appointments all on one day, try to do all my shopping on one day… It’s a long day,” he says. “I just can’t do the steps.”

Fiebig’s is not an uncommon story in the West End, where a combination of aging rental stock and low vacancy rates has caused a housing crisis that’s hitting seniors particularly hard, says Gail Harmer, spokesperson for the newly formed Seniors Housing Advocacy Group (SHAG). Once a large part of the West End’s demographic mix, Harmer says the population of seniors in the area has been steadily shrinking in the last decade. Census data from 2006 shows seniors accounted for 11 per cent of the West End’s overall population, down from 13 per cent in 2001. “I’m suggesting to people now that because of what’s happened with the pressures on the aging stock… that we’re probably down around nine per cent at the moment,” she says…

Read the full article at westender.com.

8 years ago…Woodwards was a Community Dream

Added by Sid Tan | From W2: Community Media Arts
On September12, 2002, housing activists and squatters opened the vacant 99 year old Woodward’s department store building for free housing. The courts issued an injunction on September 16 followed the next day with an enforcement order. Arrests followed and the protest continued outside…

Find more videos like this on W2: Community Media Arts Vancouver BC

Read the full commentary at creativetechnology.org.

Developer experiments with affordable condos near downtown Vancouver

No parking and no maintenance among the perks lost to make housing for couple working minimum wage

Francis Bula | Vancouver | The Globe and Mail | Monday July 27, 2010

No parking. No fancy finishes. No costly marketing program. No speculators. No one who isn’t willing to do some building maintenance.

That’s the condo experiment that one Vancouver developer is trying in an effort to build housing in the city priced low enough that a couple working minimum-wage jobs could afford it.

“Our objective was to continue the legacy we started at Woodward’s and, at the same time, we didn’t want to just bring a bunch of BMWs into the neighbourhood,” said developer Ian Gillespie. He submitted his application last week for the unusual project at 60 West Cordova…

The 108-unit project is a collaboration involving Vancity credit union, Habitat for Humanity and a Downtown Eastside housing group. Habitat will get four condos suitable for families in the building and will choose who gets them. Another eight units, to be managed by the PHS housing society, will go to local community workers.

The remaining 96 condos will go to buyers who will have to prove that they plan to live in the units and who agree to do some maintenance themselves instead of just paying standard condo-maintenance fees. According to the material submitted to the city, nearly three-quarters of the condos will sell for less than $300,000, and more than half will be affordable to people making between $29,000 and $36,000 a year. That’s the income of an individual earning $15-$19 an hour, or a couple in which each partner makes the $8-an-hour minimum wage.

Architect Gregory Henriquez said the idea of requiring owners to also occupy the condos as a way to keep prices down is something he adopted from his early days of living in the West End. Then, before the legislation that created individual condo ownership was brought in, the only way for someone to own an apartment was to own the whole building co-operatively with a group…

Read the full article at theglobeandmail.com.