Christina Montgomery
Province
The Drake Hotel on Powell Street has been bought by the City of Vancouver. Photograph by : Gerry Kahrmann, The Province
The strippers have been hustled offstage, the last glass of draught has been drawn and the 24 tiny hotel rooms that sat empty for several years are being renovated for some of Vancouver’s lowest-income residents.
The City of Vancouver announced yesterday it has bought the Drake Hotel — the longtime Powell Street bar known best for its exotic entertainers — for $3.2 million.
City housing planner Jill Davidson said an undetermined but modest amount will be spent renovating the rooms, which could be available for those on social housing by year’s end.
Proposals will be solicited from parties interested in redeveloping the hotel’s pub area.
Mayor Sam Sullivan said the purchase is part of his Civil City initiative, aimed in part at providing hard-to-house citizens with supportive rentals. The initiative’s goal is a reduction of homelessness by at least 50 per cent by 2010.
Provincial Housing Minister Rich Coleman, who was present for the announcement, said B.C. will eventually partner with the city in providing the programs that residents need — and, possibly, in eventual redevelopment of the site.
Both agreed that a chief attraction of the property was its massive parking lot — big enough, they noted, for another building or to allow the Drake to eventually be razed and replaced with something larger that might include market housing to subsidize low-income units.
Coleman used the occasion to plug the province’s recent purchase of 10 downtown hotels for low-income renters — although he conceded the purchase did more to protect existing housing than create new beds.
The purchases provided a “backstop” while further housing units are built, Coleman said.
Coun. Raymond Louie, generally a sharp critic of the mayor’s, called the Drake purchase “a good, positive investment opportunity.”
“It’s about making sure that our citizens’ taxes are spent wisely,” he said. “This was a good deal.”
But Louie also said the purchase represented only a first step toward replacing the 800 housing units that the watchdog Impact of the Olympics on Community Coalition says have disappeared from the Downtown Eastside since 2003.
© The Vancouver Province 2007