Six years after the Government of British Columbia acquired the Howard Johnson Hotel in downtown Vancouver’s Granville Entertainment District for use as rapid supportive housing during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the property is now set to completely transition away from that purpose.
The 1911-built, five-storey, 110-room hotel was initially leased by the provincial government as the pandemic began. In June 2020, the Province moved to purchase the building outright, signalling a commitment to its use as supportive housing and adding it to BC Housing’s sites for a future affordable housing redevelopment.
The building at 1176 Granville St., located near the northeast corner of the intersection of Davie Street and Granville Street, was later formally renamed Luugat.
However, over the past few years, local businesses and residents increasingly linked the building’s change of use and operations as a contributing factor to the Granville Strip’s accelerated decline, with many blaming the Luugat for rising public disorder, theft, vandalism, and other crime in the area.
Earlier this year, Vancouver City Council approved the Granville Plan strategy of revitalizing the Granville Entertainment District, which also includes gradually removing the existing single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels and supportive housing buildings found on Granville Street in the city centre.
The City then subsequently identified five potential municipally-owned sites — all located away from the Granville Strip — for the provincial government to construct brand new permanent purpose-built supportive housing buildings. Currently, City Council policy prioritizes projects that replace older SRO and supportive housing buildings on a one-to-one basis, focusing on renewal of aging stock in poor condition rather than delivering a net increase in units. As well, there is a new emphasis on smaller purpose-built buildings with fewer units and more support services for such residents with complex needs.
At the time, then-B.C. Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon said he supported the municipal government’s Granville Plan, and would explore the request to replace the properties currently found on the street.
In response to the concerns raised for supportive housing buildings such as the Luugat, Kahlon also created a new time-limited working group to give non-profit housing operators greater legal authority to respond to urgent safety issues, including the possibility of removing supportive housing from the Residential Tenancy Act (RTA) to allow for quicker interventions against “problematic and dangerous individuals” involved in criminal activities — such as drug trafficking and weapons offences — that threaten the safety of vulnerable residents and staff. These individuals also take advantage of other residents.
More than five months later, BC Housing is now signalling it will take up on the City’s plan, beginning with the permanent closure of the Luugat by no later than the start of Summer 2026.
A letter provided to Luugat residents on Thursday, and shared with Daily Hive Urbanized, states that the provincial and municipal governments “are working together to replace this single-room occupancy (SRO) building with purpose-built supportive housing.”
The letter emphasizes that a process will be established to ensure all residents are relocated to “appropriate homes,” with specification that they will be “offered a comparable housing option before the building closes.” The property will close by the end of June 2026.
Fire in the Luugat supportive housing at the former Howard Johnson Hotel building on June 11, 2025. (Kenneth Chan)
Atira Women’s Resource Society operated the building for nearly its entire history as supportive housing. In early September 2025, Community Builders, another non-profit housing provider, announced it had officially assumed operations of the property.
“We are grateful to Community Builders for their exceptional work in managing this building over the past few months. They have nothing to do with our decisions to close this building, and we are confident in their ability to operate this building and others,” continues BC Housing’s letter.
In response to the provincial government’s decision to shut down the building, Hospitality Vancouver Association (HVA) issued a statement thanking the provincial and municipal governments for the approach.
“HVA has been calling for the permanent closure of the SROs along Granville Street for several years as violence, break-ins, open drug use, and street disorder have reached untenable levels. We are thankful to Mayor Ken Sim for his tireless advocacy on this issue,” reads their statement.
Based on a September 2024 Freedom Of Information (FOI) request made by Daily Hive Urbanized to the Vancouver Police Department for statistics related to calls and incidents at supportive housing properties known to experience a high degree of operational issues, the data shows there was a 118 per cent jump in the total number of calls for service over a five-year period at the Howard Johnson Hotel, growing from 733 in 2019 — when the property was still used as a tourist hotel — to 1,596 in 2023.
There was a 525 per cent surge in weapons calls at the former Howard Johnson Hotel over five years, rising from one such call about every 46 days in 2019 (eight per year) to one per seven days in 2023 (50 per year). During the intervening years, the number of weapons calls per year reached 25 in 2020, 41 in 2021, and 34 in 2022. There were 24 weapons calls over the first eight months of 2024.
In June 2025, Allan Goodall, the owner of Aura Nightclub, situated on the ground level of the Luugat, told City Council that while he has been operating the business for 16 years, the extreme challenges did not begin until five years ago — after the property was converted from a tourist hotel to supportive housing. That same month, there was a fire on an upper level of the building, with fire officials reporting that their efforts to respond to the incident were complicated by “hoarding conditions, challenges with water supply inside, and people refusing to leave.”
Goodall said that ever since it became supportive housing, the nightclub has had to deal with at least approximately 200 floods from the activity of the residents above, resulting in numerous weeks-long closures and expensive repairs.
In 2024, the owner of Wildlife Thrift Store, located on Granville Street about one block away from the Luugat, also publicly shared the staff turnover, stress, and financial costs they have incurred due to the area’s issues.