The future for Broadway Plan renters increasingly depends on the success of the TRPP, and how the regulation will play out. The other option is upfront compensation based on length of tenancy. Near-term change wouldn’t target those existing apartment areas, the spokesperson said.Īnd for those tenants that did get displaced, the city said there was the tenant relocation and protection policy, or TRPP, which would require a developer to find homes for tenants at the same rents and then give them right of first refusal on the newly built replacement unit, at the equivalent rent. The most common reason cited was the selling off of the property.Īt the time the Broadway Plan was unveiled, a city spokesperson said the bulk of redevelopment wouldn’t affect those affordable older buildings, but would focus on the big transit stations, such as the 39-storey mixed-use tower at Broadway and Granville. has the highest eviction rate, and the vast bulk of them, at 85 per cent, are not due to any fault of the tenant. A recent study out of University of B.C., based on Statscan data, showed that B.C. In B.C., where land costs are highest, the financialization of housing is especially hard on renters. For every new rental unit built in Canada, 15 affordable low cost units were lost under federal and provincial housing supply initiatives, from 2011 to 2016, wrote researcher Steve Pomeroy, in a 2021 paper for Carleton University’s Centre for Urban Research and Education.

Well-intentioned government policy has also led to a reduction in affordable housing, according to a policy analyst. In Burnaby, B.C.’s Metrotown, hundreds of low-cost housing units were replaced by condominiums. History has shown that unabated redevelopment of a rental-rich neighbourhood has had consequences. I think that’s putting a bit of a chill on the massive displacement that I fear.” “A lot of asking prices are quite high for these developable spots. “The staff are overwhelmed with tons of permit development applications and people are hoping to get rich selling properties on the corridor,” Mr. He conceded that there is a natural pace of change due to inflation and city staff capacity. Fry said he was frustrated when council also rejected a pace of change policy, which would have capped the annual rate of development. “And I know people who live in the Broadway Corridor who have modest incomes relative to what the market is demanding now, and I have no idea what they are going to do.”

Fry, who introduced the motion to collect data on demovictions. “You see all these older apartment buildings housing people, and they are full, and they are bulldozer bait,” says Mr. Prior to that, council rejected a pace of change policy that would have limited mass demovictions.īased on city data, if all development enquiries currently with the city were to go through, an estimated 2,000 households in the area would be impacted, says Green Party Councillor Pete Fry.

Most recently, council rejected a motion to simply keep track of tenants who will be displaced by the Broadway Plan. Housing advocates are now critiquing what appears to be a swift erosion of protections against displacement. But the city reacted by putting strict tenant protections in place. Putting the renter population at risk of renovictions and demovictions raised eyebrows, with former senior city staffers such as Ralph Segal, Trish French, Cameron Gray and Nathan Edelson expressing concerns. There are 1,291 purpose-built rental buildings within the area, and much of it is older buildings where rents tend to be more affordable and livable, according to Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program. When the Broadway Plan was announced a year ago, the immediate concern for housing advocates was the plan to significantly densify 500 city blocks that contain one-quarter of Vancouver’s rental stock.

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