The tenants of rooming house on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside – many of whom use walkers and wheelchairs - say they’ve been without a working elevator for eight days in a row.

The West Hotel on Carrall Street is home to 110 people, many elderly, disabled or mentally ill. They say not having an elevator in their eight-storey building has left many people housebound.

“The biggest concern right now is for the elderly, and people who are disabled or have problems getting up and down the stairs,” said Dan Zimmerman, resident and advocate for tenants in the hotel. “They're not getting any assistance… for a lot of these people there’s nowhere else to go.”

On Friday, some residents of the hotel stood outside holding signs reading “City needs new elevator protocol now,” and “No elevator, no help, no support.”

This isn’t the first such incident at the West Hotel.

More than 90 tenants launched an action against their landlord last year, saying they went without a working elevator for 108 days. They’re now worried that the same thing is happening again.

“Equipment breaks, it’s the natural course of things,” Zimmerman said. “But we need to know things are being done in a timely manner.”

Residents living at the rooming house have also complained about a lack of security, no hot water, and mould.

In March 2015, a 24-year-old man and a 37-year-old man were killed in a double stabbing in the building. Four days earlier, another man was stabbed in the hotel but survived.

“You lock your door, that’s for sure,” Kelvin Solari told CTV News, adding that emergency services are in the building nearly every day. “I’m a pretty tough guy, but that was pretty scary.”

Tenants say since they contacted the media about the current elevator situation, a poster has gone up saying a new motor for the broken elevator has been ordered.

“A lot of us take care of each other, we always have,” Zimmerman says. “Nothing ever seems to change…but we’re hoping that the city will start changing the way things are done.”