We received this comment this morning from gentle reader Southsider in the previous article thread:
A little OT, the Sunday SE has an interesting story about the old Windsor Hotel, which the current owner (Villalobos) was trying to redevelop.
"The city gave me an ultimatum, either sell it or clean it up," Villalobos said. "I wanted to renovate it myself, but I guess the city wanted to get it done right away."
The Std-Ex website incidentally has a most excellent podcast version of this story too, leaning heavily upon the "human interest angle."
Current residents have been given two-week eviction notices by the new owners. Many of them apparently don't know where they'll be residing a fortnight hence. This story smacks of the same brand of callous disregard for those economically marginalized souls in our community which we've reported other times in this space before. Once again, Emerald City residents who have barely the means to keep a roof over their heads in the best circumstances, have been summarily told to pack their bags and hit the road.
Notably, the new owners are reportedly a little foggy about the prospective use of their newly-acquired downtown property. They'll hopefully know more, once they've consulted with their architect and engineers.
Oddly, they're opting to turn a rent-generating property into a vacant one. That's their prerogative as property owners though, we guess.
Still we wonder if it might not have made more economic sense for these young and eager new property owners to have formulated their plans BEFORE they kicked out their paying tenants. At the $140 a week per unit this fully-tenanted property is reportedly generating, this property appears to be something of a cash cow which could have been sensibly milked by these young fellows, at least in the short-run, while they get their act together.
Maybe these guys are made of money though. Maybe Boss Godfrey wanted the building vacated yesterday. It's stories like these, however, that give landlords their reputation for ruthless cold-heartedness. We think these guys may well be starting off on the wrong foot -- public perception-wise -- and these guys are certainly doing humane landlords no favors.
As for the outgoing former property owner Villalobos, we suppose it was easier to just cut and run, with Boss Godfrey and his henchmen breathing down his neck.
Not every downtown property owner has the grit of a Bruce Edwards or a Michael Moyal.
We're posting this on the fly, in the interest of continuing the discussion which has erupted in the previous article thread. We'll go ahead and move existing comments on this new topic over here. Once we've done that, we hope a few more of our gentle readers will chime in.
