drake hotel vancouver

City of Vancouver News Release

June 21, 2007

City purchases Drake Hotel

The City of Vancouver has purchased the Drake Hotel at 606 Powell Street. The Drake provides 24 rooms designated as Single Room Accommodation. It also includes a 220 seat pub that featured exotic dancers, which the City has closed.

The City has acquired the Drake to secure the development potential of the 20,000 sq. ft. site, which could include replacement housing for aging rooming houses in the area. Redevelopment of the site will be undertaken when the review of the Downtown Eastside Oppenheimer District is completed in 2009, and will depend on the availability of senior government funding for affordable housing.

In the interim, the City will be reopening the 24 rooms, most of which have not been occupied since 2004. The City will be seeking an operator to manage the 24 rooms as monthly rentals, and will be exploring possible uses of the ground floor commercial space formerly occupied by the pub. The rooms should be ready to rent before the end of the year.

For more information:

Ben Johnson
City of Vancouver Housing Centre
604.873.7542

City of Vancouver buys Drake Hotel for $3.2 million as social-housing fix

Christina Montgomery
Friday, June 22, 2007

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 Province Newspaper
cmontgomery@png.canwest.com