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Empress
Hotel’s new owner plans to shutter it
October 18
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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