TEAM

SRO Tenant Co-Researchers

Tom de Grey (In Memoriam)

Tenacious poet
Storyteller anarchist
Professorial

“I’m speaking specifically about harassment. The felt experience of evictions. I live in a very old SRO. It is in the process of being converted. Needless to say, I have a target on my back…” These were the words that Thomas de Grey spoke on numerous occasions to describe the ways in which his experiences of housing precarity, made worse by the absence of meaningful tenant protections, posed a constant threat to his life, dignity, and health. Born May 22nd, 1957 in Deep River, Ontario, Tom was a father, professional carpenter, poet, and philosopher who called Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) home for the better part of two decades. During this time, he gained invaluable insight as a tenant of several Single Room Occupancy (SRO) buildings, including the Astoria, the Afton,  Keefer Cabins, and the Arlington. Starting in 2017, Tom became a tenant organizer with the DTES SRO Collaborative and a community researcher with the Right to Remain research collective. In these roles Tom became a true leader in the community, building relationships with other SRO tenants, supporting them to advocate for improved conditions in their homes. Gaining expertise through his research on the multilayered history of tenant organizing in the city, Tom and his colleagues uncovered important insights into the ways that government efforts have failed to ensure the habitability of SRO hotels. Tom’s lived experience of the complications which arise when vulnerable tenants attempt to assert their legal rights against powerful and resourceful landlords made him an indispensable force in the years long effort to secure a vacancy control bylaw for all SRO tenants in Vancouver. Tom spoke eloquently at every City Council hearing where the public was invited to provide input, eventually leading to a nearly unanimous vote to approval the bylaw on November 17th, 2021. Suspended through legal challenges soon afterward, the Province of BC’s amendement on May 15th, 2024 to the Municipalities Enabling and Validating Act to restore the city’s bylaw preserves an important part of Tom’s legacy in providing one more step forward to address the ongoing housing crisis. Tom passed on January 2, 2024 at the age of 66 years, only five months before this law was passed.

Erica Grant

Gentle matriarch
Courageous food provider
Gentle open and true

Erica Grant is a well-known community advocate with the DTES SRO Collaborative, the Right to Remain, the Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP), and a founding member of the Vancouver Tenants Union Downtown Eastside Chapter. Her critical insight into the importance of standing up and giving voice to SRO tenants will continuously sheds light on the challenges and opportunities within tenant-led advocacy for legal changes. A resident of government-funded, non-profit run SRO housing, she has a unique experience of the complications and challenges of receiving social and health care support from your landlord. Non-profit owned and run SROs, considered favourable to privately-owned SROs by many, still presents challenges for tenants involving extra-legal evictions, privacy concerns, and dubious management strategies, as well as similar difficulties with regards to poor conditions.

Richard Schwab

Super social shrewd
Gentle lion
Reliable arlington anchor
Historically resolute
Masterchef uncle
Compatible congenial
Compassionate drummer
Chingon

For the past 17 years, Richard Schwab has been a tenant at the Arlington Hotel, a historic SRO on the edge of the Downtown Eastside in a part of the neighborhood known as Strathcona. Richard joined the Right to Remain in 2019 when his building was sold and services like phones, cable were cut off by the new landlord. Richard worked with the SRO Collaborative to organize the other tenants in his building to get these services back. By petitioning the landlord to restore services and have a laundry facility installed in the building, Richard began to get involved in more programs including becoming a tenant researcher with the Right to Remain. His work as a tenant researcher has helped him to learn more about the history and rights that SRO tenants have. He now serves on the board of directors of the SRO Collaborative and regularly speaks out about the escalating rents that he and his neighbors have faced in their building. Richard is the the Right to Remain “Tio” who enjoys cooking and has an open mind, willing to listen to all sides of any story. He values perspective and wants to right any injustice including in his own building and the other SROs.

Josh Gillan

Quick sweet tooth joker
Quiet thoughtful friend

Josh Gillan is a tenant at the Lion Hotel, a historic SRO on Powell St in the Downtown Eastside. The Lion Hotel was one of many hotels once operated  by Japanese-Canadians. He is an active tenant researcher with the Right to Remain and is involved in the B.O.L.T.S program in his building where he assists his neighbors in making repairs in their rooms, and keeping the building clean. Josh joined the Right to Remain out of a desire to learn more about his rights as an SRO tenant after talking with neighbors. Since joining, Josh has taken on many roles including delivering food in the building and organizing and getting to know the other tenants. As part of Right to Remain, he fights injustice in the SROs and continues to learn more about SRO history. Josh understands his role as that of a clog or a small speck in a larger struggle for justice including in his work fighting for vacancy control in Vancouver’s SRO Hotels. Josh can be found skateboarding around the Downtown Eastside, playing video games and keeping it easy in a hammock.

Nicole Baxter

Selflessly present
in Keefer Rooms she provides
courageous helper
Protective and kind
courageous organizer
ambitious and here

Boomer Bundy (In Memoriam)

Calm, humorous wit
Poetic, joyous, alive
Downtown eastside love

Kevin Nanaquewitang

Downtown Eastside SRO Collaborative Society Co-Researchers

Wendy Pedersen

Fireball,
warm,
sweet,
red.
Four Sisters
for brothers,
Big picture fisher

Wendy Pedersen has lived in the Downtown Eastside in social housing for 25 years and is the Director of the SRO Collaborative Society that employs twelve staff and almost a hundred tenants to organize tenant-led initiatives in the privately owned hotels.  Wendy and others are working towards creating a model for tenant-led governance in SROs.

Academic Co-Researchers

Jeff Masuda, University of Victoria

When silent calls from
elsewhere force recognitions,
he listens, dives down.

Jeff Masuda is of Japanese Canadian and mixed European ancestry and was raised on the outskirts of the City of Edmonton in Treaty 6 territory. Over the years, Jeff was mentored toward a research and teaching career that is based in the academic fields of human geography and critical public health. His research focuses on urban health equity, participatory action research, housing and tenant organizing, and the ecological dimensions of health. Jeff lives in unceded traditional territories of the K’ómoks First Nation with his partner Jennie, son Riel, and daughter Marion. He currently works as a Professor in the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria. Since 2014, he has held the Canada Research Chair in Environmental Health Equity. Jeff has served on the Board of Directors of the Downtown Eastside SRO Collaborative since 2017.

Audrey Kobayashi, Queen’s University

There is one splendour,
carrying, igniting her,
and it is power.

A native of British Columbia, Audrey completed a B.A. (1976) and M.A. (1978) at the University of British Columbia, and a PhD (1983) at UCLA. Audrey taught in Geography and East Asian Studies at McGill University from 1983 to 1994, when she came to Queen’s, initially as Director of the Institute of Women’s Studies (1994 to 1999) and thereafter as Professor of Geography. She has spent time as a visiting professor at the University of British Columbia, University College London and, most recently, Canterbury University, Christchurch, New Zealand. In 1994,  Audrey was a Fulbright Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC. Other positions include President of the Canadian Association of Geographers (1999-2001), and Editor, People Place and Region, Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

Nick Blomley, Simon Fraser University

Some purling quiet
comes into the room with him,
stitching, mending us.

Nick Blomley is a Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University. He has a long standing interest in legal geography, particularly in relation to property. His research focusses on the spatiality of legal practices and relationships, and the worldmaking consequences of such legal geographies. Much of his empirical work concerns the often oppressive effects of legal relations on marginalized and oppressed people. Recent and current research projects, often in collaboration with others, include a) the analysis of ‘rental precarity’ in Greater Vancouver; b) the study of court-imposed ‘red zones’ imposed on street-involved people and protestors in Montreal and Vancouver; c) the dispossession of Japanese-Canadians in the 1940s; d) a community-based project creating tenant-led research into precarious housing conditions in Vancouver’s most vulnerable population and e) the governance of poor people’s possessions by private and public regulators in Canadian cities. He is also trying to unpack the relationship between territory and property, and is interested in the practice of urban commoning. Past research has focused on topic such as gentrification, panhandling, urban gardening, and indigenous-state treaties.

Sarah De Leeuw, University of Northern British Columbia

Over widgets talk,
arm broke, she sips her coffee,
letting you know her.

Sarah deLeeuw is an award winning researcher and creative writer whose work focuses broadly on marginalized peoples and geographies. She grew up and has spent most of her life in Northern British Columbia, including Haida Gwaii and Terrace. She is the Research Director of the Health Arts Research Centre and teaches in the areas of Indigenous peoples well-being and health humanities. Sarah’s research sits at the crossroads of social-cultural geography, health-humanities, social determinants of health, and anti-colonial method/ologies. I am interested in why some peoples and communities have better lives than others, why other peoples and communities live with burdens of poverty, isolation, violence, discrimination, racism, sexism, or poor health. She asks questions about the determining conditions of marginalization and, while trying to answer those questions, she also tries both to recognize the tremendous resiliency and strengths that often reside in marginalized places and to document these resiliencies and strengths through creative and arts-based means.

Daniela Aiello

Daniela Aiello was a CMHC-SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University, and most recently joined the School of Public Health and Social Policy and Faculty of Human and Social Development at UVic as a postdoctoral researcher. She has been actively involved with the SRO Collaborative since 2015, joining The Right to Remain in 2017, and was the SROC board president from 2017 – 2021. With a focus on community-based research she examines the relationship between evictions, colonialism, and racial capitalism.

Students & Support Staff

Sanjana Ramesh, Staff Research Coordinator

Sanjana joined The Right to Remain as a staff research coordinator in May 2021. She gained her MA in Political Science in 2020, her work focusing on gender and sexuality rights in India. Her passion is to work in environments and projects that are rooted in decolonial and anti-racist work, which is why she enjoys working with R2R and SRO-C in this capacity. One of the highlights of working at R2R has been the stories and laughs she has shared with the tenants and staff within this team, and the cherished connection she now has with the DTES community.

Aaron Bailey, Queen’s University

Aaron is a second-year Master’s student working with Jeff and a Program Coordinator with the Eastside Illicit Drinkers Group for Education (EIDGE) at the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. In addition to supporting to Right to Remain’s archival research, he is interested in exploring the historical relationship between alcohol policy and dispossession in the Downtown Eastside. In 2020, he completed an undergraduate thesis project titled “Back to my room / And, the Bottle”: Historical Perspectives of Alcohol Problematization, Control and Harm Reduction in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside”, where he explored the story of alcohol harm reduction in the DTES through the lens of SRO history. Currently, Aaron’s research aims to mobilize this history to support peer-led alcohol harm reduction advocacy work in the neighbourhood today and support connections between housing and drug policy.

Marina Chavez, Simon Fraser University

Marina Chávez is a Master’s student in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University. She is focused on understanding the law’s role in the regulation and social construction of poverty. Before coming to Vancouver, Marina worked in research and activism on homeless encampment enforcement in the Sacramento/ Bay Area regions of California. The experiences in California paired with that of her own family led her to pursue a Master’s degree at SFU where she could use her experience to continue to advocate and collaborate with activists seeking housing and economic justice. Currently, she is working on a project related to the regulation of SRO Tenant possessions in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Her goal is to pursue transparent peer-based research that centers participant voices to understand how home is constructed and threatened through possessions.

Partner Representatives

We acknowledge the following people and organizations who have partnered with the Right to Remain Collective over the years.

	Wendy Pedersen, Coordinator
	Sherri Kajiwara, Director Curator
	Fiona York, Coordinator
	Terry Hunter and Savannah Walling
	Emiko Morita, Executive Director
	Micaela Kwiatkowski, Interim Programming Coordinator
We Press Community Arts Space	Kathy Shimizu

Alumni

We gratefully acknowledge the  students, SRO tenant leaders, and staff who have each made unique and invaluable contributions to advancing the Right to Remain in the SRO tenant movement over the years.

Carlos Sanchez-Pimienta

Jack Gates

Keith Goslin

Angela Kruger

Magnus Nowell

Sam Pranteau

Seraphina Skands

In Memoriam

Kris Cronk

Voice echoes loudly
Serious and lighthearted neighbourliness telling
stories beyond loss.

We lost Kris very suddenly in October 2021. While Kris had recently become involved with the Right to Remain, he made his presence known at each meeting and throughout the community. Kris was a gifted storyteller and beautiful soul, constantly seeking out opportunities to talk to to others about his experiences and teach compassion. Through his work with Megaphone and as a speaker, Cris impacted hundreds, if not thousands, during his time working in the community. Shortly before his passing, Kris was honoured as Megaphones 2021 Vendor of the Year. We miss Kris each day, and are privileged to have known him.

Rest in power, Kris.

Ron Kuhlke

He laughs, makes you laugh,
his neighbourliness telling
stories beyond loss.

In January 2021, we lost Ron. Ron Kuhlke was a member of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society (WAHRS), Eastside Illicit Drinkers Group for Education, and the DTES SRO Collaborative in addition to his work as a co-researcher with the Right to Remain. He was a renowned tenant advocate in his SRO building, where he successfully defended his neighbours against illegal eviction and played a critical role in forcing his landlord to restore the building’s heat and hot water during a particularly cold winter. His experience leading Residential Tenancy Branch hearings, as well as managing complex relationships with regards to his role as a tenant advocate in his building, frequently provided unique insight into the complexities of legal advocacy for SRO tenants. Ron will be remembered for his kindness, his friendship, his dedication to housing justice in Vancouver and his commitment to supporting his community.

Rest in power, Ron.