The Ranch Motel is one of the city's hottest properties, but not for the best of reasons. The heat it attracts is usually ablaze with red and blue lights.
The downtown complex is tucked off to the east side of Victoria Street's 1600 block. It faces the Redwood Square shopping complex and the Victoria Medical Building, while the quiet Connaught neighbourhood rises up from behind. It has been the butt of jokes and innuendo for years, but in the past few months police have been paying more visits there than usual.
"It has been high on our activity list, lately," said Prince George RCMP Cpl. Craig Douglass.
"We have occasion to be there basically every day, sometimes more than once. It has gotten a lot of attention from our Downtown Enforcement Unit and it has been the source of numerous complaints from neighbours and community members."
There are visual cues to any casual viewer that all is not well at The Ranch. The street sign prominently displays the price for a night's stay: $0.00.
It isn't available for tourists; all the suites are rented on a long-term basis. One room's feature window is smashed out. The dumpster is surrounded by garbage on the ground. There is a wishing well but no bucket and the brickwork is askew.
The pavement is busted, the outer property is overgrown with weeds and strewn with trash, the plant boxes have no flowers, there is something suspiciously heavy about the makeshift curtains forming visual barricades to some rooms.
Especially telling is how the residents wearing clean clothes, who come home holding parcels or bags of groceries, won't make eye contact, march directly from the sidewalk to their doors, and waste no time getting keys in the lock and doors closed behind them.
"There are legitimate, law abiding, good tenants there, and they are victims too," said Douglass.
The landlord plans to load the building up with more of these. Philip Danyluk of Living Options Real Estate Services is part of a Lower Mainland-based investor group that purchased the Ranch Motel in March.
He also owns the London Hotel, and a similar place in Quesnel, with intentions of taking these low-income complexes and shaking out the criminal element while keeping the low-income tenancy.
"We have revamped buildings in the past that have the same issues," he told The Citizen. "It's nothing new. I have worked in Vancouver with a lot of lower income people and societies, so we can make this work out. There are three or four tenants in there who are not good, and the rest are just fine. It doesn't take too many to make the building suffer. Some of these bad ones have been planted there for a while so our first task is to get rid of them. It has already started. Some are already on their way out and we are keeping up the pressure."
As the bad eggs are cracked loose from the motel, the nest will be re-feathered, said Danyluk. Work on the exterior has already begun, and a total fix-up will happen room by room.
The investor group also hired a new on-site property manager to co-ordinate the daily turnaround plans.
"Some days you win and some days you don't, but the police are doing an excellent job," Danyluk said. "We have installed a camera system so anyone who comes in and out is recorded, we take down license plate numbers of anyone who looks suspicious, and we intend for people who are up to no good to either get caught or get tired of the attention."
Douglass said the new owners and manager came of their own accord to invite the RCMP's focus on the property.
"We are happy to help if we can break up any criminal element in a place."
RCMP calls to Ranch Motel
January to July periods
2011: 36 and counting
2010: 17
2009: 13
2008: 26
