Sound familiar? It should by now, but it’s going to get a damn site more familiar as we approach the Olympic construction deadlines.
From the Pivot Newswire:
October 18, 2006
Empress Hotel’s new owner plans to shutter it
Employees of the Empress Hotel, a landmark low-income rental building in the DTES, are reporting that the new owner of the hotel has told them they are fired, and that he intends to evict all of the tenants within three months. The Empress Hotel has 74 rooms available to Vancouver’s poorest residents.
“He told me that my job was over, and that he was giving all of the tenants three-month eviction notices,” said Charles Humble, an employee and resident of the hotel.
The new owner has apparently applied for a business license to continue operating the hotel as a low-income rental building; however, the story being told to employees of the building is a different one.
“This is just like the American Hotel,” said David Eby, lawyer with Pivot Legal Society. “The owner says one thing to city hall, and a different thing to the rest of the world. The American is now closed because the City refused to look beneath the surface or act when everybody else was telling them that the building was going to close. The same thing must not happen with the Empress.”
This week is Homelessness Awareness Week, an ironic twist on the recent news coming out of the Empress Hotel. In addition, on Thursday a motion is coming before city council to ban the conversion of low-income housing in the DTES to other uses.
“When these 76 rooms close, which is clearly the owner’s intention, those people who live in the Empress and have lived there for years and years will be living on Vancouver’s streets,” says Kim Kerr of the Downtown Eastside Residents’ Association. “The residents of the DTES are tired of their housing being closed while council waits for funding that is never going to come. Council must act to protect this housing from conversion immediately.”
The 74 rooms in the hotel represent more than 1/3 of all of the 175 wet/cold weather shelter beds opening for this winter in Vancouver. Current vacancy rates for housing available to people on welfare is near 0, as reported in Pivot’s recent report on housing in the DTES “Cracks in the Foundation” which found only two rooms available in the entire city for people at the current welfare shelter rate.
For more information contact:
Kim Kerr – DERA – (604)785-0009
Charles Humble – Resident and employee of the Empress – Room 701
David Eby – Pivot Legal Society – (778)865-7997
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About Pivot Legal Society
Pivot’s mandate is to take a strategic approach to social change, using the law to address the root causes that undermine the quality of life of those most on the margins. We believe that everyone, regardless of income, benefits from a healthy and inclusive community where values such opportunity, respect and equality are strongly rooted in the law.
To subscribe or unsubscribe to the Pivot Newswire, just send a note with that subject line to newswireatpivotlegaldotorg.
raincoaster 
Perhaps they should have a campout surrounding city hall as they did at Woodwards.
Were the words “damn site” co-inicidental?
My subconscious is wittier than my conscious. I agree that City Hall is a great place for the increasingly inevitable tent city, but so are the front lawns of all the City councillors.
They can’t use Woodwards anymore: they blew it up. Check the Downtown Eastside blog in the blogroll for details.
Just a thought–perhaps the way to get the Vancouver city council to get their heads out of the sand (or the large pile of money they’re likely rolling about in, courtesy of “developers”) would be to go the city councils whose buroughs have been the recipients of the fallout?
Surrey in particular has been hit hard. Go the the councillor for Whalley-Newton and ask if he/she is looking forward to the increase in drug abuse, overdose, sex trade, sex assault, sex degrees of separation, grow-ops, assault, stabbings, vagrancy … Try to get a reaction on tape.
Council complacency in the face of this complete contradiction of everything the city promised to uphold deserves to be dragged out onto the steps of City Hall and held to account by a council of local citizens with tomatoes.
Actually, most of these DTES people stay in the DTES. Whalley/Newton is where they come from to get here. You would not believe how much worse the streets have gotten since people began to feel they had nothing to lose and no reason to be good citizens. The sheer aggro nowadays is so bad a simple walk to the pub is like trying to paddle through a school of crackhead baraccudas hoping they just don’t notice you.
Everyone down here is about thirty seconds from snapping.