Atira is suing two residents for tragic Winters Hotel fire
Legal challenge indicative of competing interests within Vancouver’s nonprofit housing industry
By Melody Wise & Jennifer McDermid with P.O.W.E.R.
On April 11, 2022 a fire broke out at the Winters Hotel. The building was managed by Atira, a Vancouver-based housing organization. The fire tragically claimed the lives of two people who lived there, Mary Ann Garlow and Dennis Guay. Another 144 residents from the Winters Hotel and neighbouring buildings were displaced.
Now, three years later, Atira is suing two of the residents contending they should take some blame for the tragic fire.
Multiple facts about the preventable nature of the fire have come to light through media and a coroner’s inquest. These reports have highlighted Atira’s negligence in upholding building safety, and raised critical concerns about the oversight and accountability mechanisms in place to protect residents in similar housing environments.
The Winters Hotel had experienced a previous fire three days before the fatal event, on April 8, 2022.
After this earlier fire, Vancouver Fire Rescue Services issued a notice of violation, which placed the building under a fire watch. The violation notice ordered immediate servicing of the sprinkler and fire alarm systems. By the time of the later fire, these safety systems were not yet restored.
On April 11, 2022, the sprinkler system failed to activate, and the fire alarms did not sound, leaving residents without any formal warning of the developing hazard. Fire extinguishers used during the April 8 fire were not replaced or refilled, rendering them ineffective during the second blaze.
Without functional firefighting equipment, residents and staff attempted to combat the fire with improvised means including buckets of water. In the aftermath of the fire, many displaced residents were relocated to buildings that were found to be similarly inadequate in terms of fire safety protocols. Vancouver Fire Rescue Services confirmed that Atira had failed to maintain fire alarms at four other buildings, and had neglected to properly maintain fire extinguishers at two of these buildings in the months following the Winters Hotel tragedy.
In 2023, residents of the Winters Hotel initiated a class action lawsuit against Atira, the City of Vancouver, and Winters Residence Ltd. (the private landowner), alleging gross negligence in the oversight of building safety and in the protection of residents living in the single room occupancy (SRO) building.
One week before the third anniversary of the fire, Atira filed lawsuits at the BC Supreme Court seeking to redirect liability to two former residents, contending that they bear partial or full responsibility for the fire.
Housing governance within Vancouver
In Vancouver, a small number of organizations receive the majority of provincial funding to build or manage housing geared towards lower-income communities (i.e., supportive housing, transitional housing), including privately owned SROs like the Winters Hotel. While funding varies, in 2022, the year of the fire, Atira received $74.1 million from BC Housing, roughly $35 million more than the next highest, similar housing operator.
This funding came as residents and frontline workers had been raising alarms about the state of Atira managed buildings for years.
Non-profit managed buildings, including those operated by Atira, have been repeatedly characterized as having heightened surveillance, limited tenancy rights, and unsafe infrastructure. Residents in these buildings contend with broken elevators, rampant pest problems, mold, severe restrictions, and unsanitary conditions, while housing executives take-home six figure salaries.
In 2022, the CRA reported that Janice Abott, Atira’s CEO, earned between $250k-300k. These tensions came under heightened scrutiny in 2023, when a forensic audit by Ernst & Young revealed serious governance failures at BC Housing, including an alleged conflict of interest between its then-CEO Shayne Ramsay and Abbott, who were married.
Atira has competing interests within its own organizational structure, which includes both non-profit and for-profit subsidiaries. In total, the organization is split into three: Atira Women’s Resource Society, Atira Property Management, and Atira Development Society. All three organizations are part of the claim blaming two Winter’s Hotel residents for causing the fire.
In the case of the Winters Hotel, Atira Women’s Resource Society received funding from BC Housing to manage the SRO as supportive housing, with Atira Property Management Inc. operating the property. Given the conflicting nature of the non-profit and for-profit arms, divergent priorities may have compromised Atira’s ability to ensure both the structural safety of the building and overall well-being of residents and frontline workers. These tensions are emblematic of some of the systemic issues inherent within non-profit managed buildings more broadly whereby accountability has historically been given to funders or the “bottom line” over residents.
As the housing crisis worsens, non-profits and SRO operators like Atira take on the role of housing provider, allowing governments to sidestep their responsibility in ensuring people’s basic needs are met. In doing so, governments hand over significant control to these organizations, who are able to dictate the terms of residents’ tenancy with little oversight or tenant protections, often allowing these buildings to fall into disrepair. In some instances, residents choose to sleep in shelters or outdoors because of the deplorable state of these buildings. There has been ample reporting on the state of non-profit managed buildings across the city.
Atira’s approach is an example of how this type of organizational structure contributes to the neglect of buildings, including the conditions that led to the Winters Hotel fire. Atira, like many other housing providers that manage supportive, transitional and SRO buildings, did little to maintain a safe home for residents. Instead, they cut corners, provided bare-minimum repairs, underpaid their frontline workers and left them with few supports, and knowingly failed to comply with fire safety standards, all the while publicly claiming to offer “safe and supportive housing.” And now, despite all of these oversights, they are placing blame on two residents who have already lost everything.
Housing as part of the carceral continuum
Non-profit and privately managed low-income housing function as parts of a broader carceral continuum, whereby residents, including those living within Atira buildings, are subjected to strict and quasi-legal program agreements in order to maintain housing. Described as “sites of social control,” the power organizations like Atira are able to exert over residents became formalized through the Residential Tenancy Act in 2024, allowing for the entrenchment of punitive policies, including prohibitive guest and family policies and non-consensual wellness checks. Long-standing relationships between housing providers and police or social and health services adds an additional layer of carceral control within many of these buildings, further solidifying non-profit managed housing’s role as part of the carceral process. With a declining number of affordable housing options in the city and few pathways to alternative housing, non-profit housing providers and managers are able to implement these kinds of tactics with minimal opposition.
Recent lawsuits filed by Atira ultimately operate as another extension of carceral control. In pursuing civil litigation, Atira, an entity entrusted with housing people living at the sharpest edges of state neglect, has weaponized the legal system to discipline tenants for conditions of neglect that they themselves were responsible for preventing. Instead of addressing their own failure to maintain safe housing — a legal and ethical obligation they are held to under the Residential Tenancy Act and the Occupiers Liability Act— Atira is leveraging civil litigation as punishment for poverty.
These lawsuits will not recover meaningful damages because that is not the point. Rather, they operate as a tool to further control residents living in non-profit-managed buildings, demonstrating that organizations like Atira are often willing to throw anyone under the bus in the pursuit of their own preservation.
Implications for tenants rights, housing advocacy and institutional accountability
The actions undertaken by Atira may also be understood as part of a broader pattern of institutional practices aimed at suppressing tenants rights and advocacy.
Reports indicate that former Winters Hotel tenants who have been vocal in seeking justice have faced threatened and actual evictions from Atira managed buildings.
According to reporting by The Tyee, Lisa Welsh, a survivor of the Winters Hotel fire and participant in the tenant-led class action lawsuit against Atira Property Management Inc., has since been evicted from her replacement supportive housing unit, which was also run by Atira.
Welsh was reportedly evicted in June 2023, just three months after tenants filed the class action lawsuit. Her neighbour, Wendy Gaspard, who also survived the fire and was active in tenant advocacy efforts, received breach notices threatening her housing stability after assisting Welsh in retrieving her belongings.
Past research highlights that the threat of eviction or legal retaliation is a common tactic used to suppress tenant organizing, particularly in housing environments such as those managed by Atira, where power differentials between providers and tenants are especially pronounced. These actions contribute to a climate of fear among tenants, signalling that efforts to hold housing providers accountable may be met with retaliation. This dynamic exacerbates existing power imbalances, where residents have limited avenues to pursue recourse without risking their housing stability.
The Winters Hotel class action lawsuit also alleges that Atira received donations that were explicitly intended to be for the benefit of residents of the Winters Hotel. It held these donations in trust for residents of the Winters Hotel, but it is alleged that Atira did not distribute the donations in accordance with its trust obligations. We suggest that the withholding of donations further demonstrates how Atira has utilized its power, particularly over resources, to control or reprimand the actions of former Winters Hotel residents, ultimately punishing them for attempting to advocate for their housing rights.
Taken together, Atira’s actions fall in line with broader elements of non-profit housing’s day-to-day functioning in which grassroots organizing efforts are regularly suppressed and expressions of assertiveness and frustration around addressing injustices within these settings are treated punitively and coded as problematic. With few other housing options, this dynamic allows those with power over residents in non-profit managed housing to continue to provide housing that fails to meet basic health and safety requirements without fear of collective action or public scrutiny.
The cost of litigation: community impacts of Atira’s legal actions
Atira’s lawsuits against two low-income survivors of the Winters Hotel fire are emblematic of the hierarchy and concentration of power that already exists within the organizational structure of housing non-profits and property managers. Within this structure those at the top will generally work to save themselves, even if it means abandoning the same residents they claim to support.
The potential threat of legal action against individual residents adds another element of coercive control in these already highly surveilled and regulated buildings, and can be understood as a clear attempt to dissuade future residents from holding organizations like Atira accountable for their systemic negligence. While Atira’s cowardice in trying to shirk responsibility for the horrific and avoidable fires at the Winters Hotel is not surprising, it represents a new low from a non-profit housing provider.
As housing across the city becomes increasingly unaffordable, having non-profit operators manage buildings is preferable to building owners renting out buildings themselves and forcing out low-income residents. At the same time however, it is imperative that these housing operators are held accountable for their legal and ethical obligation to maintain a safe and structurally sound home for residents. Further, in addressing the demand for affordable housing, there is a need to shift our reliance on non-profit managed housing as the sole solution to the housing crisis. Instead, governments must also invest in different housing approaches, including dignified, fully public housing, community-owned co-operative housing, and a substantial increase in rent-geared-to-income housing options.