The new drive from City Hall to build hotels instead of housing comes suspiciously in a period of condo developers’ crisis of profitability. Developers are facing insolvency, excess oversupply of market-rate condos, and bankruptcy met with the prospect of federal bailouts. Convenient for any developers, the city’s Hotel Development Policy was once again amended without public consultation to ensure that they get back on their feet.

This seven page (including title page and contents) document details that development should seek to solve the imaginary hotel crisis only “where no purpose-built rental residential housing will be displaced.” It now contains the insidious subsection 3.2.2.1(d) which allows such displacements in the “Cambie Corridor Plan, West End Plan, Grandview-Woodland Plan, Marpole Plan, Broadway Plan, Rupert and Renfrew Station Area Plan, and the Downtown Eastside Plan, designated Transit-Oriented Areas, or areas that are undergoing community planning programs and have interim rezoning policies.”

The Broadway Plan area alone contains 25% of the city’s rental units. This additional subsection allows planners and developers to replace rental apartments with extended-stay, micro-bachelor complexes basically wherever they want. Thanks to the absence of rent controls and tenant protections, these micro-bachelors could be exponentially more profitable than the rental apartments they replace even if they only maintain ten percent occupancy. As part of the Broadway Plan, Myron Manor is a testing ground for this model.

This Spring, Lodging magazine published an advertorial feature by Jeremy R. Gilston on the radical potential of the extended-stay hotel. “Structural shifts in employment, consumer trends, and housing flexibility,” he noted, “have expanded the population of those seeking temporary living quarters.” Gilston sees how extended--stay hotels hit a lucrative sweet spot in addressing the temporary “residential rental” needs of flexible “digital nomad” tech-workers. The vision for the hotel proposed at 75 East 8th is part of an economy run on ever more flexible, non-unionized employment, remote work, subcontracting and AI integration.

Vancouver is now advertising as a “booming tech and biotech center,” every bit as unaffordable as San Francisco or Seattle. Tech workers and digital nomads have been reimagined as the embodiment of the “hotel supply crisis,” as framed by city council and the hotel lobby group Destination Vancouver. How did the fate of unhoused tech workers and tourists come to eclipse actual crises of housing affordability, unaffordable groceries, climate disasters, and Vancouver’s speculative destruction of affordable housing through profit-driven demovictions?

Since they’ve met dismal prospects of declining returns on market rate condos, developers are seeking new frontiers of profit in the shortest intervals of time possible. And an evermore supportive City Hall is ready to get ChatGPT to write them another Neighbourhood Development Plan if they need reinforcement.

Pictured: Micro-Bachelor "hotel suite" with a beautiful view.

A number of key features make extended-stays especially profitable. As Gilston suggests, extended stays pair the amenities of “apartment living” with inflated rental rates of traditional hotel rooms. Yet simultaneously they lack the services and amenities that justify the expense, upkeep and labor costs. Unlike the usual hotel, an extended-stay model acknowledges that event spaces, restaurants, daily housekeeping, room service, ect. require full time employees. The Digital-Nomad hotel is a dystopian alternative: a high rise ghost town with digital check in, a weekly cleaning service from a third party, CCTV monitoring, robot staff, kitchenettes and washer dryers in furnished 300 square foot “micro-bachelors.” This maximizes hotel developers’ returns on vacant rooms in a City like Vancouver, which already features the highest return on vacant hotel rooms in all of Canada.

But maximizing profits is not the only appeal of converting affordable housing such as Myron Manor into extended-stay hotels. In Gilston’s provocative account, the implications of extended-stay model are as melodramatic as they are horrifying: “The line between ‘guest’ and ‘resident’ is eroding as consumer expectations evolve. Remote work, gig employment, and the normalization of flexible living arrangements have reshaped how people view space and time.”

Evolving consumer expectations offers a truly cruel euphemism to justify the displacement of approximately 40 residents, including seniors, people with disabilities, an Indigenous elder, immigrants from all over the world, and young families.

While this promise of the extended-stay hotel has our skin crawling, it's unfortunate we have to say, numbered holding companies and private equity firms will not dictate our perceptions of time and space!!!

As cynical as this sounds, this is the inhuman substitution and reality of displacement that Nicola Wealth and Lotus Capital are presenting as a investor-profitable “fate” for the 40 residents of 75 East 8th Avenue. But nothing is fated and etched in stone. Crucially, the enraged and steadfast tenants of 75 E 8th have formed the Myron Manor Collective in active coalition with allies across neighborhoods and sectors, demanding their right to stay over hotel developer’s extended-stay dystopia.

For further reading, we encourage you to check out Unite Here Local 40’s new report: Vancouver’s Hotel Room “Crisis”: A Developer Giveway, Not an Affordabilty Solution