Eviction day for Balmoral Hotel residents

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Monday marked deadline day for tenants to leave the Balmoral Hotel after the City of Vancouver issued eviction notices 10 days earlier due to deteriorating conditions and structural instability at the SRO.

Starting early in the morning, dozens of tenants lined the sidewalk outside the dilapidated single-room occupancy hotel awaiting their eviction compensation cheques. City crews and police officers sifted through the crowd, while on the street, moving vans and police cruisers brought traffic down to one lane westbound on East Hastings.

Each resident is supposed to receive a cheque with an amount based upon how long they lived in the building.

After arriving early to wait in line, Digna Delcastro emerged from the lobby of the Balmoral Hotel empty-handed.

“No cheque, no cheque,” she says, clarifying that the workers inside told her the cheque wasn’t ready yet and she would have to wait, though why wasn’t clear.

Delcastro, 63, says she’s lived at the Balmoral for five years and likes the location because her private room is within walking distance to groceries and her dishwashing job in the Carnegie Community Centre.

“Me, I have no regrets. I love to live in the Balmoral,” she says. “The building is dirty and lots of trouble. No discipline. I have no house to go and I must live there. The most important thing is my room had my own toilet.”

She says her outreach officer with BC Housing found a place for her to stay at the Yukon Transitional Housing Centre, but is worries she’ll have to move in with her brother in Surrey, a long way away from her job and life.

“I’m very upset and stressed about what happened in the Balmoral Hotel,” she says.

Balmoral Hotel tenant Digna Delcastro- Photo by Lasia Kretzel. 

Tenants and housing activists held a block party on Sunday to protest what they see as a failure of the city to enforce bylaws to prevent the deterioration of the Balmoral and other SROs.

The City of Vancouver announced on Friday that it secured 131 low-income rooms for evicted residents, but activists say that’s not enough and some people are still searching for housing.

The Balmoral’s owners, the Sahota family, will be ordered to repair the building immediately, according to the city, otherwise the repairs will be done and the bill will be sent to the family. The city is also trying to take the family to court for more than 150 bylaw violations.