New future proposed for hotel with seedy past
American Hotel may reopen with low-cost housing
By Lori Culbert, Vancouver Sun September 22, 2010
Vancouver's dilapidated American Hotel has been closed since 2006, when its tenants were evicted.
Photograph by: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun, Vancouver Sun
It was once home to notorious drug dealers and some of the city's most vulnerable citizens, but in recent years Vancouver's American Hotel has housed only rats and garbage.
City council, however, will consider a proposal this week to see the dilapidated hotel at Main and Prior Streets converted into 42 low-income, single-room units.
The proposal is controversial with some housing advocates, as only six of the rooms will be rented at the welfare-friendly rate of $400 per month, while the rest will be geared to low-income workers.
However, Coun. Kerry Jang, who hammered out a deal to save the century-old building with its new owner, argues it is better to have six rooms renting near $375 than none.
"Without this agreement there would be no low-income housing at all because it would sit empty, so this is an increase in the stock," he said.
City Hall, which enacted a bylaw in 2003 to try to protect single-occupancy rooms and to avoid demolition of these old hotels, will decide Thursday whether to approve the renovation, which could be completed by January.
The American was raided by police and the owners illegally evicted the tenants before it closed in 2006.
The building's new owner, Steven Lippman of Living Balance in Gastown, recalls the inside of the three-storey building before it was gutted this summer.
"It was full of junk and clothes ... and rats in there. It was pretty bad," said Lippman, who owns other SRO and apartment buildings in the city.
There is a need in Vancouver, where rental availability and affordability are both consistently low, for suites aimed at people who have low-paying jobs, Lippman said.
Jang estimated the rent could be $600 to $800 a month for the other units. The financial reality, the councillor added, is this proposal involves no provincial or municipal funding, making it impossible for the building owner to rent every room at $400.
In comparison, another project expected to be approved by council on Thursday is the conversion of 40 SRO rooms in the boarded-up Pender Hotel into 24 suites rented at $375 per month. The difference, Jang said, is that the Pender is owned by the province and receives government subsidies.
The Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) released its third annual housing report Tuesday, noting a drastic decline in the number of Downtown Eastside rooms that still rent for $375. CCAP's Wendy Pedersen panned the American Hotel project, because there are 700 homeless people in the community who need rooms at welfare rates.
"Even though we recognize that the city likely did a great deal of work to finagle the deal," Pedersen said, "this is a dangerous model that the city shouldn't try to replicate."
Jang said CCAP's report is "quite right" that the number of $375 units is declining, but argued to turn that around would require the federal government to get involved and for the province to invest even more than it has already spent renovating SROs.
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