Jillian Skeet has war stories enough to fill a book, make a movie and write a television series besides.

Brandished weapons, psychotic rampages, vicious attacks on staff, drug-induced fires, flooded rooms, blocked toilets, destroyed walls and doors, pet rats, olympic-level hoarding, misguided advocates, desperately vulnerable youth, and so much untreated mental illness and addiction, she says the situation is unsustainable.

Skeet does a job most of us would never consider and can barely imagine.

For nearly a decade, she has helped manage several privately owned single room occupancy (SRO) hotels in Vancouver’s infamous Downtown Eastside in what’s known as the “housing of last resort.”

Some of her tenants are among the most severely addicted and mentally afflicted people in our province. They have wreaked mind-boggling damage and life-threatening aggression on fellow tenants and staff alike.

Yet even after a tenant repeatedly destroys property, and threatens or beats up other residents and staff, government-funded advocates will fight a tenant’s eviction, taking the case to the Rental Tenancy Branch, delaying the tenant’s removal for weeks or months.

“No one wants a system where people are being evicted without cause,” said Skeet. “I’ve heard, over the years, of SRO private owners who apparently treated tenants very badly, but I don’t think we fall into that category at all.

“We have never, ever evicted anyone unless they have been a serious danger to the other tenants or the building.”

Creating community in the DTES

There’s a palpable sense of community in the East Hastings pub Skeet runs like a community meeting place for neighborhood SRO residents. She is frequently swarmed by people needing to tell her things or just wanting to talk; she leans over to speak with customers, giving each her undivided attention, if only for a minute or two.

Skeet seems like someone who is in continual motion. A soft, but sure, speaker, gripping stories, all well-told and full of heart, pour out of her. A judge once called her testimony on behalf of an SRO “powerful,” even as he ruled against the facility’s owner.

She has a steadying presence, and jokes her time in warzones prepared her well for her work in the Downtown Eastside. She spent many years as an international social justice advocate at the UN in New York and Geneva, where she travelled across war-ravaged Iraq and through unfriendly situations in Russia. From there, she turned her skills closer to home, working on social justice files for prominent NDP MP Bob Skelly.

All of which led her somehow to the Downtown Eastside.

Everyday, she leaves her home and steps back into the community she and others serve, as clear and sure as first responders. It’s a fragile dynamic they’re trying to uphold, where battle-weary tenants just trying to get by and gain some order and connection in their lives, are terminally disrupted and imperiled by the most maladjusted among them.

A fire a day

And now the lastest scourge of the Downtown Eastside has heaped another burden on SRO operators and their tenants – incessant fires.

Vancouver Fire Rescue Service says it responds to an average of one SRO fire a day in the Downtown Eastside, a majority of them caused by smoking materials related to doing drugs.

Skeet can’t help but see a correlation between the proliferation of fires in the past few years and drug users’ preference for smoking fentanyl, which requires a sustained open flame like a butane lighter or candle.

Private operators used to be the bad guys

For years, private operators were blamed for the third-world living conditions of DTES residents they housed. Then B.C. Housing and the City of Vancouver got into the SRO business, and government’s tune changed.

The province went on a buying spree after the pandemic hit, converting motels and hotels to single-room facilities for the hardest-to-house. Officials soon found their own facilities overrun with the same destructive forces they’d blamed on private “slumlord” operators of the past – drugs, weapons, violence, theft, sex work, gangs, criminality, and more.

The problem says Skeet, is some people are too mentally ill and severely addicted to manage themselves in a single room occupancy setting, government funded or otherwise. Neither are funded to give tenants the care they need. Without any public funding, private facilities are even more overwhelmed.

BC goverment needs a backup plan

BC’s housing of last resort needs a backup plan, Skeet says. Someplace these people can go to be cared for safely and properly, and so the tenants who are currently being terrorized by them can find some peace.

As it stands, despite a whopping $600 million of government funding reportedly being poured into organizations serving the Downtown Eastside every year, there is no continuity of services or health care providers. And nowhere for people to go for long-term addiction and mental health treatment.

Skeet would know. She’s tried too many times to count to get people access to health care, only to hit a wall of dysfunction and disorder.

After guiding me around the Downtown Eastside for a couple days last week, Jillian sat down with Northern Beat to share some insights and give listeners a glimpse of a world most of us might otherwise never see.

Enjoy,

Fran

Podcast producer: Rob Shaw

Feedback: [email protected]

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