Building Subsidised Housing on Swamps as a Business Model? A Look at Red Door Housing’s Redevelopment Stratagems

Last year, the Red Door Housing Society approached the city of Delta with a proposal to redevelop Ladner Willows, a subsidised housing complex long plagued with mould issues. Despite the acute shortage of affordable housing and the dire urgency of remediating decay besetting disabled tenants, public opposition to the project was such that city council ended up voting it down.

Why would the public oppose a motion allowing a charitable housing provider to provide safe and affordable housing for its tenants? I would like to answer NIMBYism, but unfortunately it turns out asking the question is denying the answer: the housing society isn’t as charitable as it looks, and it doesn’t mean to offer healthy and affordable housing, least of all to its current tenants.

Red Door Housing has submitted a nearly identical Ladner Willows redevelopment proposal to the city of Delta this year, perhaps gambling that a newly-elected council would prove more amenable, but I’m predicting a repeat of the public backlash. Let’s have a look at the objections neighbours and advocates alike invoke in opposition to the project, not as shown on paper (few oppose it in principle) but as an indictment of a notorious slumlord purposefully neglecting its properties in order to justify displacing its tenants and increasing its rents.

Ladner Willows isn’t Red Door Housing’s first redevelopment. A clear parallel can be made with Mi Casa, another of its properties previously with mould issues, which reopened in 2021 after being rebuilt with more than double the number of units. Red Door pitched a very similar case back then, describing it as an aging building whose issues weren’t worth remediating, using money it didn’t have, which would force it to raise rents for all of its tenants. Like for Ladner Willows, it would instead relocate eligible tenants, who were allegedly promised right of first refusal on the new suites. Sounds like everyone’s winning, right?

Definitely not previous tenants. Red Door Housing, in its own rationale, made an explicit admission the redevelopment was about raising rents, by as much as 100%, while making most tenants ineligible for the new subsidised suites under the terms of the Rental Assistance Program (RAP)—assuming of course any could afford them at all.

Mi Casa also wasn’t an aging building. When Red Door Housing sought approval for the project, it was about 31 years old, whereas the federal government’s conservative estimate for such a construction’s useful life expectancy is 45 years (and well below the 113 years the supportive housing complex I live in has been around). It shouldn’t have required extensive renovations within such a short time frame. Hence accusations of purposeful neglect.

Unfortunately, contacting former tenants of Mi Casa is proving challenging, so let’s have a look at other Red Door buildings where tenants instead chose to entrench themselves or otherwise fight back. Because in contrast, it wasn’t difficult at all to find overwhelming evidence of systemic and purposeful neglect.

Which brings me to the case of Janna Martin at Cougar Creek, yet another ‘aging’ Red Door Housing property. Janna started complaining about mould due to water damage in her suite as early as 2019, stressing the fact it was causing her various health ailments while clogging her CPAP device. She produced multiple doctor letters to her landlord explaining the urgency of remediating the mould problem, but Red Door Housing would keep downplaying it.

She eventually ordered a mould report in 2021 at her own expense showing an elevated amount of penicillium/aspergillus spores. Even this didn’t sway Red Door; it would eventually disclose that it ordered the suite tested too, but that its own report, which it did not produce, showed the problem to be in contrast benign.

Further dispute on how to remedy the problem led Janna to file a complaint with the BC Human Rights Tribunal. Meanwhile, Red Door agreed to relocate her to Quayside, a newer building which is itself already plagued with issues, but it still wouldn’t decontaminate her belongings, which she had to leave behind. This quandary led to most perplexing developments. In June of this year, the landlord moved her contaminated belongings to off-site storage, extending her four months to claim them back lest they get discarded. This is really odd, in so many respects: it would have been easier and quicker to decontaminate the suite from the onset, it would have been cheaper than to move the tenant and store her belongings at its own expense for months, and it can be perceived as retaliation against a BC Human Rights Tribunal claimant.

I have reached out to Bailey Mumford, CEO of Red Door Housing, requesting a proper rationale for its course of action, and have yet to receive an answer by publication time. Let’s hope we get a reply before October 19th, the deadline past which Janna’s mouldy belongings are to be disposed of.

In the meantime, I’ve been pondering the question myself, and I can only come up with one plausible explanation: Red Door actually wanted the tenant to move to a newer building, without having to admit responsibility (hence liability). Let’s have a look at the construction years for the complexes I’ve listed so far: Mi Casa was built in 1985-86, Ladner Willows in 1988, Cougar Creek in 1990, and Quayside in 1999. The first two have been targeted for redevelopment around the thirty-year mark within a few years of each other, and Cougar Creek is only two years more recent than Ladner Willows, which could make it the next one projected for redevelopment. In contrast, Quayside could be left to rot for several more years before it’s deemed worth rebuilding, making it a good dumping ground.

In other words, there’s a clear pattern of tenants being displaced to more recent buildings in order to pave the way for redevelopment, while making sure they have no way back into the renovated suites, which are instead meant for wealthier tenants. I’ve already exposed in an earlier article how Red Door Housing, with the complicity of BC Housing, conspired to turn formerly subsidised housing into a lucrative business model while enjoying the benefits of a nonprofit, so there’s a clear incentive for the society to engage in such behaviour.

Even then, Red Door obviously cannot offer to relocate everybody, and has no incentive to extend such an offer to the poorer among them. So what happens to those who cannot be pressured to leave? Let’s ask Elizabeth Zbitnoff, whose case I’ve already broached in a previous article. She’s been living at Ladner Willows for several years and been complaining about issues such as mould for about as long, and just like Janna she has medical ailments exacerbated by, you guessed it, mould.

She’s also an advocate rallying fellow tenants who resist relocation or cosmetic renovations by unqualified workers, and she will reach out to just about anyone who will listen (or not), including politicians, lawyers, journalists, and advocates. She’s even filed a class-action lawsuit with Janna in March against both BC Housing and Red Door Housing claiming widespread neglect across the latter’s properties.

Somehow her landlord doesn’t think she’s a keeper, and has since aggressively been trying to evict her. Of course it couldn’t invoke classic renoviction clauses since it doesn’t have the city of Delta’s approval to redevelop the site, so it went for harassment instead by blaming her for the damage in her suite, essentially implying she’s a hoarder. Of course the argument won’t hold before the Residential Tenancy Branch, but landlords have every incentive to put pressure on uncooperative tenants and face no liability for making spurious claims.

Even then, Red Door Housing stands out as particularly bold in claiming the tenant is currently ‘overholding‘ the suite (which is basically squatting) even though the eviction is being disputed and the process effectively on hold until further notice.

Tenants who either don’t know their rights or hesitate to assert them may yield for less, and indeed the word is that many have been either deceived or pressured into leaving, which may be why the building currently sits half-empty. These claims are difficult to verify because victims typically fear speaking up. Even then, I’ve been in contact with quite a few across sites who shared their ordeals in varying levels of detail, including of course graphic pictures and videos of the damage in their suites.

One of them is K, whose name I shall withhold even though she didn’t request anonymity, because I haven’t been able to confirm this issue by publication time. K is currently a tenant at Fraser Lands, yet another derelict Red Door Housing site, whose disabled daughter’s symptoms are triggered by—indeed—mould.

I’ve saved Fraser Lands for last because it’s the most graphic clusterfuck on the list, and that’s saying something. K has had to relocate with her daughter, at her own expense, because Red Door Housing started retrofitting it, by a contractor which seems to lack relevant qualifications, without relocating the tenants. What’s even worse is that work stopped midway, leaving the whole place a construction site on hiatus.

Apparently there’s no more money from BC Housing for maintenance or relocation, the contractor won’t finish the work in unsafe conditions anyway, and there’s no legal recourse via the Residential Tenancy Branch or the City of Vancouver, in part because of Red Door Housing’s partnership with BC Housing. And of course K has been subjected to retaliation by her landlord, to the point of verbal abuse allegedly caught on video, after reaching out to everyone listed in her phone book.

K has been promised a meeting with her MLA, which last I heard kept being postponed. I look forward to it happening and learning of the latter’s stance on his constituents’ living conditions, funded with taxpayer dollars. UPDATE 2023/10/12: I just learned that the meeting did occur over Zoom on September 28th. A promised follow-up statement has yet to be released.

These precedents are in essence what fuels objections to Ladner Willows’ redevelopment. I would like to conclude by quoting another tenant, who wrote a commentary to the City of Delta back in 2019 to spell out this quagmire:

I watched as Red Door Housing let this maintained complex go from livable to falling apart with chronic mold and a host of other issues. Now they claim that it will cost too much to repair so they must bulldoze the whole place and start over, when in fact if they had just maintained it in the first place it would be fine. If Ladner Willows needs help it is their fault. If they fail to maintain a 41-unit complex, I shudder to think how well they may maintain a larger complex. Will it soon become an eyesore, just another pet project, a way for them to charge more rent and pat themselves on the back for providing more housing when in fact they are pushing people out of their homes. They say it will be an improvement but really it is just an excuse to cover up their negligence under the guise of a renoviction.

Excerpt from a letter sent by a Ladner Willows tenant to the City of Delta on November 12, 2019

That sums it up. Anyone left thinking our affordable housing crisis will be solved by bulldozing older properties and building more suites?