ABSTRACT
In October 1997, Wade Luciak, the owner of the Hotel California in Vancouver’s Downtown South neighborhood, evicted fifty long-term tenants, and gave notice to fifty more. Rents were increased from the near-welfare rate of four hundred dollars a month that long-term residents paid to a nightly rate of sixty dollars (or eighteen hundred a month). The owner ordered the evictions to make room for higher paying tourists, and because of his concern with a proposed city bylaw designed to discourage the demolition of lowerpriced units. Luciak reportedly saw this as an unjustified limitation on his profits and his abilities to run his business as he saw fit. In a media interview he claimed to regret the evictions: “I really think the world of them [his tenants] and they think the world of me.”1
