Westward Ho plays vital role downtown
residents enrich neighborhood

Jan. 31, 2002

The right people live in the Westward Ho.

The hotel's role as federally subsidized housing for low-income seniors and the mobility-impaired is perfect for this elegant, historic building and for downtown Phoenix.

Those who dream of restoring its glamour as a luxury hotel should wake up and look somewhere else to solve downtown Phoenix's hotel shortage. Those who want to transform its rooms into high-priced condos can do the same.

Downtown revitalization means more than gentrification. It demands more than $400-a-night hotel rooms.

The kind of truly vital downtown that Phoenix deserves will not be an artificial, sterile and overpriced environment. It will be alive and varied. It will meet the housing, recreational, shopping, business and cultural needs of all types of people.

That includes the 292 elderly and disabled residents who call the Westward Ho home.

They contributed a living, breathing presence to downtown when few others would. The owners of the Westward Ho kept the building useful and safe when downtown was being deserted.

The hotel's reincarnation in the early 1980s as subsidized housing deserves to be recognized as an important early step in downtown revitalization.

It deserves to be appreciated.

And so, too, the residents. Their lives have been as rich and eventful as Westward Ho's history. Their presence in the hotel is as enriching to downtown as were the visits years ago of folks like Paul Newman, Myrna Loy and Alfred Hitchcock.

People like to say that famous folks visited Westward Ho in its heyday. But the pending renewal of an agreement with the federal government to continue subsidizing apartments at the Ho marks another heyday for the hotel. In addition to subsidizing rents for the elderly and disabled, federal money also will pay for needed improvements.

It will ensure that the right people continue to live in the Westward Ho.

It will be a terrific next step in downtown Phoenix revita- lization.