The Right to Remain is a multi-year research project that examines the Single Room Occupancy (SRO) buildings in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). Our project is run collaboratively, involving academic researchers, non-profit societies, grassroots community organizers, students, and alumni. Together, we are uncovering the story of the SRO, as means by which to reveal the importance of these buildings for addressing—both theoretically and practically—the interface between urban activism and socio-spatial rights. Currently in it’s third iteration, Right to Remain seeks to mobilize learnings from our tenant-involved and arts-based exploration into SRO history to inform urgently needed action to protect tenants in the Downtown Eastside.
In this project, we ask: What does a tenuously housed community do when their human rights are subordinated to property and planning regimes that infringe on their very ability to remain in place?
The intensifying pace of SRO conversions from low-income to middle-class housing in the DTES mirrors previous rounds of creative destruction inflicted on this community through colonialism, racial prejudice, and the withdrawal of care for the mentally ill, veterans, and others who have found refuge and support in this low-income community for nearly half a century.
Specifically, we explore the potential for tenant organizing in SROs to protect the human rights of those dwelling within them by advancing a politics of inhabitation that works against neoliberal forces of dislocation. Our main community partner, the DTES SRO Collaborative, is pursuing housing rights through direct action using advocacy and legal mechanisms. As a community-based participatory action research project, we work with the Collaborative to clarify the historical legacy of the SRO as a site for the struggle over rights in order to advance a research and political agenda that prioritizes adequate social housing as a human right and a first step to community.
The Right to Remain is a four-year project funded by an Insight Grant awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2017 – 2021). We thank our peer reviewers and the hard-working staff at SSHRC for their intellectual and administrative labour.