When British Columbia saw record-breaking temperatures during the 2021 heat dome, Stephen Nelson witnessed firsthand just how quickly those temperatures can turn deadly.
Nelson was living at the Keefer Rooms in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) when his friend and neighbour, Mario, began “suffering from the heat,” Nelson told What on Earth.
Mario had difficulty taking care of himself, Nelson said, so he and his girlfriend tried to help as temperatures soared. They opened the windows and turned on a fan in Mario’s room to try to bring the temperature down. Meanwhile, they looked after him in Nelson’s room and made sure he had plenty of water.
“He started feeling better so I put him back in his room and I went to sleep. I woke up and I just had this bad feeling that nobody checked on him, and sure enough, I went next door and he was dead where I put him down to watch TV.”
A coroner’s report provided to CBC by the B.C. Coroners Service confirmed Mario died during the heat wave after extreme heat compounded existing medical conditions.
BCCS also said it “does not have any files on anyone else dying at the Keefer Rooms during that timeframe.”
The Keefer Rooms is one of roughly 100 single-room occupancy buildings, or SROs, in Vancouver, where tenants typically live in small rooms and share bathrooms.
The extreme heat crisis killed 619 people. A report from a panel convened by the B.C. Coroners Service (BCCS) found that 10 per cent of those deaths occurred in social housing, including SROs.
But the crisis also spurred SRO tenants and their neighbours to action, bringing them together to document temperatures and find ways to stay safe when temperatures spike.
Checking on the neighbours
Wendy Pedersen founded the Downtown Eastside SRO Collaborative Society, which works to improve conditions for tenants.
Pedersen said teams of tenants now work in about 30 SRO buildings, including “H2O teams” — heat and hydration organizers who check on neighbours and deliver bottled water during heat waves.
The organization has also helped tenants open cooling rooms in two SRO buildings and secured funding from Vancouver city council to open six more, Pedersen said.
One opened last month in a building called the Main Rooms.
Roger Haskins is one of the tenants who helped the SRO Collaborative monitor temperatures in the building last summer.
“Pretty much every day was over the 26 C that the City of Vancouver prescribes as too hot,” Haskins said. “And there was a couple hours here and there that was like over 40.”
Even if tenants can access free air conditioners through a provincial government and B.C. Hydro program for people with lower incomes, the electrical infrastructure in their building can’t necessarily support them, Haskins said.
“Every unit has at least two or three other units all on one 15 amp circuit,” he said. “So this cooling room is gonna definitely help a lot of people.”
Gabby Doebeli, a researcher with the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Climate Justice who worked with tenants such as Haskins to study temperatures in the SROs, said the heat doesn’t abate much at night.
“We found that indoor temperatures are routinely around 10 degrees hotter than outdoors, which makes it really challenging for people to sleep,” Doebeli said.
“And what we’re seeing is that there’s certain types of housing that are not fit for living in the context of a warming city. Climate issues are housing issues and housing issues are climate issues. So we can’t think of them as separate.”
Heat physiologist Daniel Gagnon, a researcher at the Montreal Heart Institute, said exposure is a key factor in how people fare during heat waves.
“So obviously buildings that are maybe not ideally built for hot temperatures, where there is no … infrastructure for mechanical cooling like air conditioning, people who live within those types of places are gonna be much more exposed to the environmental conditions,” says Gagnon.
But while Vancouver’s SRO buildings are far from perfect, they represent an important form of housing that needs to be preserved and protected, Pedersen said.
Together they contain more than 7,000 rooms and are often both the last affordable option for people at risk of becoming homeless and the first step out of homelessness for others.
B.C.’s coroner service is calling for a new alert system and upgrades to building cooling systems after last year’s deadly heat dome resulted in 619 deaths.
Coming for the cooling, staying for the tea
At another SRO building, the Arlington, tenants say they’ve built community while improving their safety during extreme heat.
The first SRO cooling rooms were set up there about two and a half years ago, with funding from the provincial ministry, the City of Vancouver and a charity called SPARC B.C.
A heat pump cools the room in summer and warms it in winter, while shared appliances give tenants a place to prepare food.
Ty Renney, a member of the tenant leadership team who has lived in the building for 13 years, says the room has made a big difference.
“A lot of times people come in for the cooling room, or come in for the kitchen and end up chit chatting.”
Richard Schwab, a 21-year resident, said another tenant brings donated food from a food rescue organization and cooks for the group.
“It’s a nice way to spend Sunday night,” he said. “Some people don’t have families, and this is their extended family.”
Pedersen said the SRO Collaborative faces funding gaps for expenses such as renting cooling rooms from landlords, installing heat pumps, buying bottled water for hot weather and paying small honorariums to tenants who take on leadership roles or work as heat and hydration co-ordinators.
“So we’re trying to get funding from the province and the feds to keep going,” she said.
In the past, the federal government has provided grants to landlords, Pedersen said.
She says additional federal funds could pay for electrical upgrades so tenants can have more cooling options, including in their rooms.
Environment and Climate Change Canada pointed to federal retrofit and climate-resilience programs when asked about funding for SRO upgrades.
B.C.’s Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs said in a statement emailed to CBC, “We deeply appreciate the work of community groups like Downtown Eastside Single Room Occupancy Collaborative Society to support people in the DTES.”
It also said SRO units “are not a long-term housing solution” and “do not offer the standard of housing we want to see” in B.C. However, the statement acknowledged they can’t be eliminated in the short term “without causing more people to shelter outdoors.”
The ministry pointed to an $11-million grant to the SRO Collaborative in 2023 and new housing projects in the neighbourhood, including the Ho’-kee-melh Kloshe Lum, which opened in May with 248 homes and shelter spaces.
Doebeli says people often think of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as a place that needs fixing.
“But what we’re seeing is that it’s not, that it’s a place that has solutions. It’s a place where people are taking care of each other,” she said.
“All the groups in this neighbourhood have done so much for me when I was homeless. It’s kind of nice to, like, give back, you know?” said Stephen Nelson, who now works as a tenant leader at Main Rooms.
“A lot of people get a bad impression, but, like the best people are down here. There’s so much goodness down here that people don’t see.”
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