Submitted by Chad Krahn, a former candidate for Red Deer City Council

Buying Potential

As long as I’ve lived in Red Deer, the Buffalo Hotel has represented potential, or more accurately, lost potential.

The grand entrance to downtown Red Deer showcases a beat-up old hotel with a sign for a coffee shop. But there is no coffee shop and no one has booked a hotel room in decades. There are long-term rumours that the inside has been completely trashed, which wouldn’t be surprising given that the hardest to house folks were given rooms there for over a decade. This was essentially confirmed by the mayor’s comments about needing personal protective equipment just to go inside the building and the fact that no developer has taken a chance on it since Canadian Mental Health moved out three years ago.

So council bought it so they could tear it down and some day flip it. Financial details haven’t been released so we will have to reserve judgement on that aspect. By this summer the Buffalo Hotel and the Club Café will be just a vacant lot. Addition by subtraction. There is talk of combining the lot with the parking lot directly south making it a sizeable piece of prime redevelopment land. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a shortage between downtown and Capstone. But ultimately this will be a step in the right direction. No one has been willing to invest the capital needed to bring the Buffalo Hotel up to where it needs to be, and a clean slate gives us the chance to reimagine what could be done with that property. This is the gateway to downtown after all!

But there is something that council will need to address in the meantime. While a beat-up old hotel isn’t a great look, a vacant half-gravel, half-asphalt lot doesn’t inspire confidence or fit the vibrant vibe downtown is supposed to have.

Rather than simply wait five or ten years for a developer to be interested in the property, we need to look at some creative temporary land uses. We don’t need another vacant lot that people drive by or more parking downtown. With a little bit of vision, this could be a productive place.

What if that lot could be a pocket park, a place to showcase sculptures or a permanent parking place for a food truck? Imagine a few extra picnic tables, some mulch to cover the gravel, a few potted trees, some paving stones for kids to play hopscotch. There is pavement that would make a great parking spot for a coffee bus or an ice cream truck. Suddenly we can have an inviting place at the gateway to downtown! All we’d need is a sculpture of a big red deer and this place would be well on its way to be the most iconic place in the whole city!

Tearing down Buffalo Hotel is a big step, its buying potential but hopefully that potential isn’t wasted as we wait and pay for it all in opportunity cost.