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

NEWS: Senior renters fleeing West End

By Jessica Barrett

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.

While younger tenants may regard their rental situation as temporary and accept dilapidated conditions in exchange for cheap rent, Harmer says seniors are often longstanding tenants who pay some of the lowest rates around, and are therefore afraid to speak up for their rights. “Even the group of seniors that are active inside SHAG at the moment live in fear of complaining about these things, simply because they are afraid that their rents will rise, or that the landlords will sell the building and the new buyers will come in and want to do a complete retrofit, and then they’re the subject of renoviction,” says Harmer, referring to a loophole in the province’s Residential Tenancy Act which allows landlords to evict long-term tenants in order to renovate suites and then charge considerably higher rates for the same space.

Harmer says she’s aware of several West End seniors who routinely put up with unacceptable rental conditions, such as intermittently functioning elevators, shoddy plumbing, and bedbug infestations, all of which are present in the Hyperion, according to various tenants. To make matters worse, Harmer says, the available avenues for tenants to hold landlords accountable are difficult for seniors to access. Dispute-resolution hearings through the Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB), for instance, are frequently done over the phone, says Harmer, which can be confusing for older people who already balk at negotiating the complex bureaucratic framework involved in fighting for their tenant rights.

That was a barrier for Ervin Jay, 62, who says he has shied away from contacting the RTB because of the difficulty of dealing with the process over the phone. Jay says he did contact the City of Vancouver, hoping building inspectors could do something under the City’s Standards of Maintenance Bylaw (the piece of legislation dealing with building upkeep), but he was told the City couldn’t help.

That’s because a building has to be virtually uninhabitable before the City will apply for injunctive relief, a court order forcing the landlord to make repairs or pay up, explains Vision Vancouver councillor Kerry Jang. “It would have to be uninhabitable, and that’s up to our staff to determine whether [injunctive relief] is worth going for. We prefer to work with landlords,” he said.

In many cases, Jang added, multiple factors, such as sourcing parts, get in the way of making timely repairs in older buildings, underscoring the need for new rental stock in the West End. That’s precisely what the City is trying to encourage under its Short Term Incentives for Rental Housing (STIR) program, says Jang.

But that doesn’t satisfy SHAG’s Harmer, who says market rental housing developed under the STIR will be unaffordable for seniors living on a fixed income. “Those projects will not be able to house moderate-income seniors,” she says. Additionally, the City should press harder on landlords to maintain things like elevators, which Harmer says constitute essential services for seniors.

Meanwhile, the Hyperion’s building manager, Hugo Wiebe, says Jay and Fiebig will receive a discount on their rent next month. He also said the building’s owner, a Hong Kong-based businessman known to many of the tenants only as Joseph, has agreed to spend the $175,000 necessary to repair the elevator. The maintenance company is currently sourcing parts.

Since taking over the job seven months ago, Wiebe says he’s been overwhelmed trying to keep up with the demand for repairs, the result of neglect by the building’s previous manager. “But I can’t do it overnight; it has to happen little by little,” he says.

That’s cold comfort for Fiebig, who has spent most of the summer confined to his home; or his roommate Jay, who feels equally trapped. “Never mind how much the rent is. Try and find another vacancy in the West End,” he says.

reporter@westender.com