When Dave Rouleau and Monika Benkovich accepted a position from Living Balance to manage 36 SRO (Single Room Occupancy) units in the York Rooms, they had no idea what to expect. “We thought we were totally going to help out all the people in the building,” Rouleau describes in an online interview, “we’d been to rallies on the DTES and looked at it as an opportunity to get on the inside and really tell the truth.” The building’s history in the Downtown Eastside was rife with petty crimes, impoverished living conditions, and a general state of disrepair.

Rouleau and Benkovich’s work involved cleaning up used syringes, evicting at-risk tenants, and dealing with anti-gentrification protests in response to John Cooper’s new upscale Latin-American restaurant below, Cuchillo. It appears that when they accepted the managerial position, they were expecting a certain type of resident with a specific kind of poverty. Those tenants who agreed with their ideology, or who worked with them against opponents of the York, they befriended. “His name is Roger. We are still friends, I talk to him regularly,” Rouleau posted on Facebook, regarding  of one of the York Room tenants he bought lunch for, keeping Roger from attending a press conference about his impending eviction. “I was like, look at this fucking crazy press conference, lets get the fuck out of here,” Rouleau replied when questioned.