NEW LEASE ON LIFE FOR PENDER

Tenants Of The Squalid Hotel Faced Eviction Until An Unusual Change
In Management

VANCOUVER -- A Downtown Eastside flophouse known for squalor, gun
crime and rooms for torture when drug deals go wrong, the Pender
Hotel seemed sure to close when Vancouver city officials issued a
shutdown order earlier this week.

But the city pulled back Monday over last-minute concerns about
turfing the dilapidated building's 40 impoverished tenants out into
the cold and, in an unusual move, handed the management to an
Eastside advocacy group.

Now, the Downtown Eastside Residents' Association is tasked with
picking up the garbage strewn in the hallways, keeping the insidious
criminal element away and putting locks on the beaten-down doors in
the hotel, which sits across Pender Street from Tinseltown Mall.

"Now I can sleep at nights," tenant Nadine Sinclair, 41, said as she
smoked on the threshold of her room, the lopsided door hanging by a
single hinge from a dilapidated frame.

Police kicked the door in, she said, in a raid last September in
which they and firefighters combed the building for a crystal meth
lab. They never found one, but the doors they kicked down stayed down
because no one fixed them, she said.

With no doors, strangers come and go, squat in her friends' bedrooms
or deal drugs from the abandoned rooms. Someone has to stay awake all
night to watch for thefts in the 37 rooms with no security, she said,
but something always goes missing anyway.

Ms. Sinclair had options if the hotel was closed, she says. "I
probably would have sold some drugs and rented a room somewhere else."

But she says she'll stick around. "We think now it can get better."

Inspectors found a litany of violations of building, fire and safety
codes, as well as shoddy lighting and poor maintenance, said Barb
Windsor, deputy chief licensing inspector. They also found two people
locked inside a room, she said.

While many rooms were evacuated, 12 tenants have been allowed to stay
in the unusual deal with DERA, she said.

DERA executive director Kim Kerr said the organization will fix the
doors and put security in the building, and the estate that manages
the building will pay for 24-hour staff to care for the tenants, many
of whom have mental health issues or are addicted to drugs.

Tom Colby, who lives on the second floor, said with the door frames
broken, padlocks on the outside of the rooms are the only way people
can lock their doors. But those padlocks are illegal, largely because
people can be locked inside, which is what happens when people don't
pay their drug debts, he said.

The actions of the police in September did more to hurt the residents
than any drug enforcement has done to help them, said lawyer David
Eby, who is representing seven tenants in a $140,000 suit against the police.

In the suit, residents claim they were detained for six hours without
being allowed to go to the bathroom, and that police smashed the
doors despite being offered keys.

"What they did that day hastened the demise of the Pender Hotel," Mr. Eby said.

Shutting down the hotel would have been disastrous for housing in the
Eastside, as 132 rooms in two other hotels, the Astoria and the Lucky
Lodge, are facing a shutdown by the city after a seven-week
undercover police raid that culminated in charges last month, he said.

"That's more than a hundred people looking at being tossed on the
street," he said, adding that the city has the legal authority to fix
the hotels without shutting them down.

In the Pender Hotel raid, police were acting for the residents'
safety, said Inspector John McKay. After finding propane tanks in the
basement, police said they expected to find a crystal meth lab.

"The place was being used as a shooting gallery and you took your
life in your hands living there," he said. "We had reports that
people were being tortured for drug deals. The place looked like hell."

When crime festers in a building, it spills out onto the street
below, Insp. McKay added, and police have to be active in dealing
with the crime in the building.

Police are doing an audit of the 50 worst hotels in the area, and
will release their results in April, he said.

The Pender Hotel, worth some $840,000, is owned by Adumac Holdings,
which was owned and managed by businessman James Duffy until he died in 2004.

Since then, the only authority at the hotel was a claimant to Mr.
Duffy's estate through a same-sex common-law relationship, said
lawyer Richard Hamilton, who represents the estate's administrator.

"He was purporting to manage it, but he wasn't doing the job," Mr.
Hamilton said.

Adumac gladly ceded control to DERA, he said, adding that it would
get the hotel back on track. "It's not the Carleton or the Ritz, but
the legitimate tenants are getting something now."