The Replacement Housing Doesn't Exist Yet. The Buildings Close Next Month.

The province is closing 280 units of supportive housing it owns on Granville Street. No confirmed construction date for replacements. The World Cup starts June 13. This is not the first time.

In 1986, a man named Olaf Solheim was forced out of the Patricia Hotel in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He had lived there for decades. He was given a week’s notice. In the weeks that followed he became despondent, stopped eating, and died. Dr. John Blatherwick, Vancouver’s own chief medical health officer at the time, told the press he died of a broken heart. A commemorative plaque was installed in 2013 on the light pole in front of the Patricia Hotel, the very building that evicted him, which was still owned by the same individual at the time. It went missing the same day it was put up.

This year, BC Housing, which is the provincial government, is closing a 110 unit building on the Granville strip that it purchased in 2020 and converted from a Howard Johnson hotel during COVID specifically to house vulnerable people. The building closes by end of June. The World Cup starts June 13.

Some residents are being relocated to temporary housing elsewhere in the city. As of early April, thirty had moved out and fifty remained. The province has said all residents will be offered a comparable housing option before the building closes. What comparable means after years of building trust with workers, the pharmacist, and the peer network in that specific building is a harder question. The permanent replacement housing, the 280 new purpose-built units promised in the Agreement in Principle signed by Mayor Ken Sim and BC Housing Minister Christine Boyle in March 2026, has no confirmed construction start date. The five proposed replacement sites have not been publicly disclosed.

The Luugat is one of three supportive housing buildings on the Granville strip the province has committed to closing. St. Helen’s Hotel at 93 units and Granville Villa at 77 units are the other two. The province has confirmed it has no timeline yet for those closures. The combined total across all three is 280 units. The Agreement in Principle commits to replacing all three with new purpose-built units outside the entertainment district.

When asked directly whether the Luugat closure timeline was related to FIFA, BC Housing said “no, not specifically.” The timeline was requested by the City of Vancouver as part of its broader plans for the Granville Entertainment District. Mayor Ken Sim welcomed the news. His words: “Supportive housing does not belong in the Granville Entertainment District.” The Hospitality Vancouver Association was also pleased. Spokesperson Laura Ballance said the closure was “a big step in this area of the city being ready to welcome tourists and guests from around the world” ahead of FIFA.

These buildings had serious documented problems. Between 2020 and 2025 the Luugat and St. Helen’s recorded 74 fires. The three buildings generated 1,364 police calls in 2024 alone, one in every 125 police calls across all of Vancouver, from buildings that house one in every 2,500 city residents. A nightclub below the Luugat flooded 200 times. The buildings needed to close. The question is the timing, and what happens to the people living there while the replacement units that do not yet exist get built somewhere undisclosed.

The neighbourhood was built around these people.

The entire Downtown Eastside falls inside FIFA’s two kilometre beautification zone around BC Place. The stadium was built beside that community. The services were never moved. The food programs, outreach workers, and harm reduction services are exactly where they have always been because that is where the people who need them are. Now people are being treated as the problem when the city created that situation.

You cannot put a stadium next to the most underserved neighbourhood in the country, leave the entire support infrastructure in place for decades, and then be surprised that people are still there. Closing the Luugat the same month the tournament begins is not a coincidence. The hospitality industry said so themselves.

When someone is swept, they do not just lose their spot. They lose their medications. Their ID. Without ID you cannot access most housing or services. The act of moving someone can literally lock them out of the system meant to help them. The peer support workers who know them by name, the social workers they have spent years building trust with, the pharmacist who holds their prescriptions. None of that travels to the next block. You are not moving a problem. You are compounding it.

Residents near BC Place face their own disruptions. Pacific Boulevard is closed from May 23 to late July. Residents and businesses on restricted streets near the stadium need match day local traffic access passes to reach their own homes. The host committee held an information session on May 11 and confirmed passes are only now being mailed out in mid May. The first match is June 13. Residents are only now learning how to access their own homes on match days.

The impact does not stop there. When parents have no stable base, children are removed. Children who experience homelessness are significantly more likely to face it again as adults. The cycle does not break on its own.

This is not the first time.

In the months before Expo 86, more than a thousand low income residents were evicted from SRO hotels in the Downtown Eastside, many with a single day’s notice. At the time, BC’s tenancy rules did not apply to people living in SROs. Olaf Solheim was not the only one. Advocates who were there estimate several other deaths resulted from the evictions. His was the only one directly linked by officials. “He’d been moved from where he was to a place he didn’t want to be, and he simply lost his will to live and he died,” said Dr. Blatherwick. The city’s own words.

The 2010 Olympics brought similar promises. No displacement. Legacy housing. A socially sustainable Games. Vancouver’s unhoused population grew by nearly 11 percent in the years that followed. City staff later denied the street sweeps happened. That denial is contradicted by extensive documented evidence. If you read the first piece in this series, you already know the details. The short version is that this is the established playbook. Vancouver is following it while claiming otherwise.

Expo 86. The 2010 Olympics. Now FIFA. Same neighbourhood. Same promises. Same silence from the people responsible.

The numbers behind the crisis.

Metro Vancouver needs 46,000 new homes a year just to keep pace. In 2024 it built 28,000. The affordable housing waitlist sits between 25,000 and 30,000 people. Advocates say the real number is higher because many do not bother joining given how long it takes.

The FIFA bylaw takes effect tomorrow, May 13, granting the city expanded enforcement powers to clear streets within the tournament’s “beautification zone.” The Human Rights Action Plan that was supposed to protect residents has still not been finalized.

The cost of hosting seven matches has ballooned to as much as $624 million. The full budget has still not been disclosed. Host committee lead Jessie Adcock said on May 6 that an updated figure would come in the next few weeks. FIFA keeps the revenue from ticket sales and sponsorships. Vancouver absorbs the costs. A recent report from The Canadian Press notes the true economic impact may never be known because there is no standardized methodology to measure it and no requirement for the city to disclose the full costs.

It is not only the unhoused.

Community events that have defined this city for decades have been cancelled or scaled back. The Dragon Boat Festival, the largest in North America and a significant cultural event for Vancouver’s Chinese community. The Celebration of Light. Lynn Valley Days. A skateboard park was shut down because it fell inside the security perimeter. Bylaws were amended without a public vote.

Disabled fans who wanted to attend could not secure accessible seating. Tickets were sold without eligibility verification, meaning anyone could buy accessible seats. They are already reselling on FIFA’s own platform at over six times face value. For the first time in World Cup history, companion tickets are not free. FIFA’s own accessibility guidelines state companions should not be charged. Vancouver is the exception. For people who cannot attend without a companion that is not an inconvenience. That is exclusion.

The roadmap already exists.

Canada ran a Housing First pilot program called At Home/Chez Soi, including in Vancouver, between 2009 and 2013. It worked. It demonstrated 30 percent cost savings compared to leaving people unhoused. Supportive housing costs between $13,000 and $18,000 per person per year. Traditional institutional responses including emergency shelters, hospitals and the justice system cost between $66,000 and $120,000. Finland reduced long term homelessness by 75 percent using this exact approach, starting in 2008, by giving people stable housing first and wrapping supports around them after.

Canada saw the evidence. Canada ran the trial. Canada did not scale it.

The people most likely to be harmed are always the last to be consulted and the first to be moved. That has been true since 1986. It is still true now.

The cameras arrive in June. The housing crisis was already here.

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