City buys hotel to increase social housing stock

The City of Vancouver has bought an oldhotel in the Downtown Eastside as part of the effort to deal with the city's homelessness crisis.

The 24 rooms of the Drake Hotel on Powell Street have been vacant for more than three years, with only the 220-seat bar-strip club still operating.

The city, which bought the hotel for $3.2 million,plans to renovate the rooms before reopening the Drake, with the provincial government picking up part of the tab.

In April, Premier Gordon Campbell announced the province was spending $80 million to buy 11 single room occupancy (SRO) hotels in Vancouver and Victoria, and to pay for more supportive housing units in the Lower Mainland. Ten of the hotels are in Vancouver, most of them in the Downtown Eastside.

B.C. Housing Minister Rich Coleman said purchasing the Drake will go a long way toward helping the province increase the availability of social housing in Vancouver.

"The reason we moved on the SROs is to protect some existing stock for people at risk of homelessness and know that we needed a place that we could improve the lives of people that were at risk of homelessness and need a system of multiple barriers and supports."

David Eby of the Pivot Legal Society says the city is slowly moving in the right direction, but buying pre-existing housing is the wrong approach.

"It's one thing to protect the housing that we have, but we need to move to the next step of replacing it, because it's really substandard the Drake included and it needs to be replaced with actual social housing."

There's no word on when the renovations will be completed.