A longtime Vancouver thrift store along the Granville Entertainment District strip is lashing out against governments over the ongoing business costs it claims are due to a nearby affordable housing site.
Wildlife Thrift Store is on the corner of Granville and Drake, and its owners are calling for action after they say the staff turnover, stress, and financial costs have reached a boiling point.
“The last three years, our business has spent over $300,000 to cover the recent, mandatory costs of security guards and broken windows. This is a ‘new cost of doing business’ we have been forced to pay in order to keep employees safe and keep up with the ongoing damage to our building,” it wrote on Instagram.
“In 2021, The Howard Johnson Hotel on Granville Street was converted to house those experiencing homelessness, mental health and addiction — the EXACT demographic our business aims to help through regular quarterly donations and has in Vancouver for over 23 years now. All of those dollars 💸 COULD have gone/be going to the charities we benefit.”
The store is not a registered charity. However, its website suggests it has donated more than $150,000 to charities such as Coast Mental Health, The Gathering Place, and the Greater Vancouver Food Bank in 2024 alone.
“The Lower Mainland is vast — there are superior, less harmful locations to help patients than the centre of our beautiful city,” Wildlife Thrift Store said in their post.
“It is up to you [Mayor Ken Sim and Premier David Eby] to shut it down before helpful, contributing business owners like ourselves are sacrificed.”
BC Housing
However, the store isn’t the only place complaining about escalating costs due to vandalism. The pandemic saw a surge in vandalism in the city, as well as in several other Canadian cities such as Toronto, Kelowna, and Winnipeg.
According to the VPD, property crimes in 2024 decreased from the previous period and are below pre-pandemic levels. Thefts, break-ins, arson, and mischief are also down.
“There was a significant, sustained decrease in property crimes after the pandemic was declared near the end of Q1 2020. Property crimes have decreased two quarters in a row and remain lower (7,228) than the historical quarterly average since 2017 (9,112),” the report said.
Daily Hive spoke with Wildlife Thrift Store owner Gary Ahlqvist who said those numbers don’t reflect the reality he is seeing.
“What you’re reading is nothing to do with the reality on the streets. Those are like boilerplate, print them out, public relations stuff from the city, basically. That’s just PR on the streets, the police are overwhelmed and do not understand what the point of their job is, if nobody ever gets punished for committing crimes,” he explained.
Adding that for many previous incidents, he didn’t file a police report at all.
“It’s a large waste of time when you’ve already been assaulted and have a bunch of stuff stolen if someone tried to light the store on the fire to then have to go through the police process, which inevitably leads to nothing. You just want to cut your losses, kind of is the problem, and that’s the same for everybody.”
He said for him and his business, it’s very apparent that things need to change.
“We lived for 19 years without security to all of a sudden, now $100,000 a year to pay a security guard who’s trained to take people down violently because that’s the only thing that will do the job. It’s immensely frustrating to us, and that’s what wears you down,” he said.
BC Housing and the BC government bought the 110-room building at 1176 Granville Street for $55 million as part of an affordable housing project. At the time, it was announced that residents would include those who had been displaced by the clearing of the Oppenheimer Park encampment. However, the province had said it would eventually become affordable long-term housing.
“In the interim, the Howard Johnson site will operate as temporary supportive housing while long-term plans are developed,” a release reads in part.
Adding, “Atira Womens Resource Society will operate the housing at the hotel, which includes wraparound supports where people have access to services such as meals, health care, addictions treatment, and harm reduction, as well as storage for personal belongings. The site also has 24/7 staffing to provide security to residents of the building and the surrounding neighbourhood.”
Atira Womens Resource Society did not respond to a request for comment on the current state of the site, which has been renamed the Luugat, nor on concerns from Wildlife regarding allegations against the residents themselves.
Daily Hive has contacted the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Police Department for comment and will update the piece if that information becomes available.