Pivot Legal Society and the Carnegie Community Action Project held a press conference today attacking the Sahotas and the Laudisios for being "slumlords". Here's an article Megaphone assistant editor Amy Juschka wrote for the August 22nd issue about the Laudisios:
Doubled Over: Downtown Eastside landlords find new ways to exploit tenants
By Amy Juschka, with files from Blake Sifton
Tight lipped and weary-eyed, Anna Laudisio does not smile as she looks up from the glass partition that separates her desk from the rest of the lobby at the Brandiz on East Hastings. Sharp and calculating, she recognizes me as an outsider the moment I walk through the door of her Single Room Occupancy hotel. And although irritation is evident in her tired eyes as she tells me, once again, that she doesn’t speak to journalists, I keep returning to the Brandiz because Anna can’t seem to help herself.
“They’re like animals,” she blurts out, pointing to a tenant’s written complaint on the lobby notice board, which claims that someone has been defecating out the window of the Brandiz. Anna doesn’t trouble to keep her voice down, though a number of her tenants are with us in the lobby. “These people just have a natural propensity to be filthy.”
In a neighbourhood teeming with unscrupulous slumlords, the Laudisio family is well known among police and housing advocates in the Downtown Eastside. And while their notoriety comes as no surprise, given Anna’s general disdain for her tenants, this family of landlords has found a new way to exploit their residents by forcing them, against their will, to share cramped and dilapidated ten-by-ten units after charging them the full price of a private room.
Anna, 50, her husband Mario, 56 and their two sons, Giuseppe and Gianni, own the Lucky Lodge at 134 Powell, the Hampton Rooms at 568 Powell and the Brandiz Hotel at 122 East Hastings. While the family’s history includes charges of welfare fraud, numerous fire code violations and the facilitation of theft under $5,000, the family has now discovered a way to legally exploit their tenants.
“They’re stacking us in like sardines now with two forced into a room,” says Fred Ironstar, a First Nations man who has resided in two of the Laudisio’s Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels. “I had my own room at first at the Brandiz but then this woman was moved in and we were forced to share.”
A few months after being doubled up at the Brandiz, the Laudisios moved Ironstar to the Lucky Lodge when he complained that his roommate was stealing his cash and personal belongings. And while Ironstar now has his own room, his living conditions at Lucky Lodge are in gross violation of the City’s Standards of Maintenance By-law.
I meet Ironstar outside the Lucky Lodge and we talk for a while before he takes me on a tour of the building he calls home. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after enduring the residential school system, Ironstar is now on disability, having being diagnosed with cancer.
“I’m fighting the federal government right now on residential school issues,” he explains. “I’m hoping that I can get a settlement so at least I can get out of here, it’s very important that I get out of here.”
Ironstar, whose wife returned home to Saskatchewan after her mother suffered a stroke, hopes to find a new place by the time she returns to Vancouver.
“My wife, she only has 40 per cent of her vision so she’s disabled,” explains Ironstar. “You think she’s gonna put up with shit like this? I told her I’ve gotta get us another place because my place is just swamped with bedbugs, I sleep with the lights on.”
We enter the Lucky Lodge and climb the dank steps to a dark hallway, where Ironstar tells the two men, smoking behind the reception desk, that I’m a friend who is picking something up. I’m asked to surrender a piece of I.D. but one of the men jokes that it’s not a big deal because I don’t look like much trouble. I’m surprised at the relative ease with which I’ve been able to enter the building.
The security at Lucky Lodge is in stark contrast to the Brandiz, where Anna watches the door like a hawk and would surely be suspicious of anyone who looks out of place. Ironstar unlocks the door to his room and cockroaches scatter in every direction. His window is propped open and a small fan runs on high but it’s no match for the oppressive wave of hot, stale air that we are hit with upon entering.
“My place is infested with cockroaches and bedbugs,” he explains, as he takes me around the room and points out the many cockroach holes that he’s attempted to block with whatever he can find. Cockroaches spill out as he removes the papers and tape from the holes lining the walls and floor.
“My wrist was broken when I was mugged in the building for a pack of cigarettes, but the bedbugs are so bad here that they infested my cast and started laying eggs. I just couldn’t take the pain and itching anymore so I had to cut the cast off myself and now my wrist won’t heal.”
Lack of running water is also an issue for tenants at both the Brandiz and the Lucky Lodge.
“I have no water,” says Ironstar as he holds up the severed tubes that should connect running water to the sink in his room. “I was promised water last year at Brandiz and now I’ve moved here and I still have no water. I can’t even shave or brush my teeth.”
While the Laudisio’s ‘upgrade’ of Ironstar to a single room at the Lucky Lodge can hardly be considered an act of kindness, he could be considered fortunate when compared with other tenants who are forced to share cramped and pest-infested rooms, much like Ironstar’s, at both the Brandiz and Lucky Lodge.
Although underhanded, doubling up tenants is technically not illegal as the City of Vancouver’s Standards of Maintenance bylaw indicates that a sleeping unit, “equipped to be used for sleeping and sitting purposes,” has to have at least 50 square feet of gross floor area for each occupant.
“The Laudisios’ rooms have all been measured by the city,” explains Constable Jodyne Keller of the Vancouver Police Department. “Legally the rooms are big enough to accommodate two tenants so our hands are tied.”
According to Constable Keller, who has had numerous dealings with the Laudisios throughout the years, the family rents to tenants on the presumption that they will have a private room but quickly move to double them up.
“Anna’s very tricky,” says Keller. “She’ll show you an empty room and you’ll say, ‘Great, I’ll take it.’ She signs your intent to rent and you take your slip to welfare. When you go back she says, ‘Oh, that room I showed you yesterday, it’s full now so I’m gonna have to put you here.’ The room is already occupied. And she’s doubled you up.”
With the average welfare recipient receiving $375 a month in shelter allowances, the Laudisios are able to take in $750 a month for a 100 square foot room with no bathroom or cooking facilities and, according to tenants, no running water.
When questioned, Anna Laudisio replied that her family’s practice of doubling up is good for the tenants. “Doubling up rooms is the greatest thing that ever happened to these people,” she says. “They’re lonely, they have no company… they don’t get any calls; no brothers or cousins or friends call them. It’s good for them to have a roommate.”
But while the practice of doubling up may just straddle the line of legality, in the past the Laudisios have found themselves on the wrong side of the law. In 2005, the Vancouver Police Department launched a ten-week long undercover operation entitled Project Haven, which targeted three Downtown Eastside SROs; the Astoria, the Gastown Hotel and the Laudisio’s Lucky Lodge.
Project Haven revealed widespread trafficking of drugs and stolen property in the Lucky Lodge. Anna and Mario Laudisio were found to be committing welfare fraud and buying stolen property from undercover officers.
“The Laudisios arrived and we say, ‘Hey, whatever you need we can get… so they start putting orders in for us to go steal something and bring it back and sell it to them for next to nothing,” explains Constable Keller.
Officers sold watches, electronics and home furnishings to the Laudisios for a fraction of the retail price. Charges of fraud under $5,000 were laid but the Crown opted not to go forward with charges for the purchase and possession of stolen property because they believed it would be too difficult to prove that the Laudisios knew the items they were buying were stolen.
The Laudisios were, however, ordered to turn over their business license for the Lucky Lodge to their son and were subsequently barred from the property. They were also charged, but not convicted, of welfare fraud in 2007, after a similar sting by the VPD.
While the Laudisios are now careful to remain within the loose confines of the law, it remains evident, by their practice of doubling up tenants, that they continue to discover new and colourful ways to exploit Vancouver’s most vulnerable.
Dina, a young First Nations woman who is currently doubled up with her boyfriend at the Lucky Lodge also complains of no running water and pest infestation.
“It’s cramped and there’s not enough room,” she says. “They said when we moved in that we would have water but it’s been three months and still no water. It’s cockroach infested too but they don’t listen.”
The Laudisio family is well known to housing advocates in the neighbourhood. “They cause more trouble than any other landlords in the Downtown Eastside,” says Doug King, an advocate with the Downtown Eastside Resident’s Association (DERA). “The amount of complaints we get revolving around them is especially high.”
While DERA is aware that the Laudisios are doubling up their tenants, they are reluctant to take action out of fear that complaints could lead to the loss of more social housing stock. Sitting down with director, Kim Kerr and community legal advocate, Sabrina Driuna, I am told that DERA is now especially careful when it comes to taking on landlords in the neighbourhood.
“In the old days you would put on pressure and you might get something done but today you just get the hotel closed,” explains Kerr.
DERA worries that taking on the Laudisios for doubling up their tenants could result in more people living on the streets. For them, doubling up is the lesser of two evils.
“Even though doubling up tenants is an unscrupulous act and I can’t believe that the province is allowing it to go on, at this point DERA isn’t making a stink about it because it might result in more hotels being shut down by the province,” says Driuna.
Laura Track, housing lawyer and campaigner with Pivot Legal Society, is also at a loss over the Laudisio’s practice of doubling up. “Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find any law that prevents a landlord from double bunking,” she says.
Track contacted the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance about the matter and was told that the Ministry’s official position is that if a tenant has a room, the landlord is entitled to a shelter payment, regardless of whether they are doubling up their tenants. Track regrets that the practice appears to be legal but it seems her hands are also tied on the matter. “What pisses me off is that these landlords are able to take in two shelter payments for one room.”
So while advocates and police watch from the shadows with bated breath as the Laudisios continue to exploit our society’s most vulnerable and fear that cracking down on them may result in more homelessness, the Laudisios unscrupulous acts may end up pushing people onto the street anyway. After showing me around his apartment, Fred Ironstar says he may end up choosing the streets over the ‘housing’ provided for him by his government because the conditions inside are worse than those outside.
“I’m going to leave here and sleep on the streets,” says Ironstar, on his way to collect bottles and cans in order to buy himself a coffee. “This is just too wrong.”
