FIRST READING: B.C. turned a $56 million hotel into a low-barrier shelter. It’s now an unliveable biohazard

Former Howard Johnson hotel at 1176 Granville Street in Vancouver, BC Thursday, June 26, 2025. The hotel is now an SRO with a nightclub in the ground floor. It has been the scene of numerous fires. Photo by Photo by Jason Payne/ PNG

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Just six years after B.C. spent $56.5 million transforming a Vancouver hotel into a low-barrier homeless shelter, it has been revealed as an unsalvageable biohazard.

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Luugat is the name given to a former Howard Johnson in Vancouver that in 2020 was repurposed into a 110-room full-service homeless shelter.

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Pets and even on-site drug use was welcome. In fact, there was a vending machine onsite dispensing free needles, crack pipes and other drug paraphernalia.

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“Luugat primarily caters to low-income individuals and operates with round-the-clock staff, ensuring that residents receive comprehensive support and care at all times,” reads the shelter’s still-active website. Residents were also promised free meals, free housekeeping and “timely maintenance.”

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Now, with the Luugat being evacuated after years of constant fires and floods, the interior has been described as an unliveable nightmare of collapsed ceilings and hoarded garage.

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Last week, Global News obtained video showing one of the Luugat’s rooms stripped of furniture and piled with an estimated four feet of garbage, all of it soaked by an overflowing toilet. The video was shot by Allan Goodall, the owner of a nightclub on the building’s first floor who has regularly faced ceiling collapses from the rooms upstairs.

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“There (are) multiple rooms you can’t even go in, the roofs are caving in,” former resident Stewart Holcombe told the broadcaster. But when a camera crew asked to take a closer look at the state of the building, B.C. Housing denied the request, citing privacy concerns.

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According to a tally compiled by Vancouver Sun, in its six years as a shelter, Luugat has been the subject of 906 emergency calls, including 334 alarms, 43 fires and 12 incidents identified as “rescue or hazard events.”

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Holcombe estimated that the building was “destroyed” within a year-and-a-half after opening, and has remained in that state for a further 4.5 years.

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Nevertheless, it wasn’t until November that the province announced the Luugat’s closure, along with two other nearby low-barrier shelters.

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And Luugat is only one of an entire constellation of former hotels to have suffered the same fate.

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It was one of nine hotels, located in both Victoria and Vancouver, that the Province of B.C. feverishly acquired in the opening months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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As with Luugat, all were transformed into low-barrier shelters with no checks on who was coming in or out, and with drug use encouraged on site.

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And in every case, the hotel conversions quickly became hubs of fires, floods, civic disorder and even organized crime.

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Muncey Place, a former Comfort Inn in Victoria, was purchased by the province for $19.2 million. Just last May, Victoria Police raided the site and found one of the rooms doubling as a drug trafficking headquarters containing one kilogram of fentanyl, $40,000 in cash and a loaded 9 mm pistol.

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The Patricia Hotel, purchased for $64.4 million in 2021, was the site of an officer-involved shooting just a year after opening. Police arrived to deal with an erratic man attacking other residents with a stick, and shot him when he charged them with a knife.

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In recent years, some of the repurposed hotels also became scandalized by reports that workers were needing to wear respirators to avoid exposure to ever-present fentanyl smoke.

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Last summer, B.C. acknowledged the issue by pledging a new plan to “address air-quality issues related to second-hand exposure to fentanyl.”

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