Single room occupancy hotels still serve as housing in Winnipeg despite dwindling stock
CBC
Angela Tates was living alongside a river in Winnipeg before getting a room in the McLaren Hotel on Main Street, which she has now called home for the past 10 years.
It's believed Tates is among hundreds in the city who rely on single room occupancy hotels as a place to live, according to Equal Housing Initiative, a non-profit organization which has plans to retrofit and provide supports to residents at the McLaren.
"It was really hard to get a reasonable place to live," Tates said. "When I lived by the river I kind of just slept outside and went and ate at the mission and took a shower at the mission."
"It's nice to get into a place like this even though it's not very elegant or very high-class. It was reasonably priced and it was available."
Tates pays $450 per month for a small suite with no kitchen or private washroom. There are two shared washrooms on each floor with one toilet and tub. During a tour of the building given to CBC, one resident complained the hot water on his floor hadn't worked in four years.
A 2005 report titled Beyond a Front Desk: The Residential Hotel as Home from the University of Winnipeg's Institute of Urban Studies defines single room occupancy hotels or SROs as buildings that were previously operated as traditional hotels.
"We know that in Winnipeg's case, probably at its peak I would suggest, we probably had a thousand people living in downtown hotels as their primary residence," said Jino Distasio, a University of Winnipeg professor of urban geography who was one of the principal investigators of that report.
Distasio said the stock of SRO hotels in Winnipeg is dwindling.
"Over the last two decades we've lost upwards of a dozen hotels in our downtown, and that's been to demolition, to fire and also to conversion," he said.
The most recent example is the 43-unit Windsor Hotel on Garry Street, which has been sold, displacing at least 20 low-income renters who had called it home.
Only one person still lives in the Cambridge Hotel on Pembina Highway, which has a total of 11 units no longer available for rent due to a pending demolition, according to general manager Jimmy Gresswell.
"We don't want to put someone up there and tell them, 'hey, you have to leave now,'" Gresswell said.
In 2020, the St. Regis Hotel on Smith Street was demolished after being sold.
Kate Sjoberg, Main Street Project's director of community initiatives, said losing units creates homelessness.
