Single Room Occupancy Hotels (SROs) provide housing for some of Vancouver's most impoverished citizens. SROs are the least expensive accomodation, with average rents of of $350 per month (9). Given that welfare recipients recieve $325 per month for housing, for many people in Vancouver a cheap hotel room is all they can afford. For many tenants of SROs, the only alternative is the street. This is why Vancouver's dramatic loss of SRO rental stock is so tragic. In 1971 there were 13,400 SRO hotel rooms in Vancouver (10). By 2001 Vancouver's most affordable rental stock dropped 52% to 6400 rooms (10). Over the same period the City of Vancouver's population increased 28% and the regional population roughly doubled (8). Clearly, this has contributed to the rise of homelessness in Greater Vancouver.

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