Opinion: Tenant rights shouldn't be an afterthought during redevelopment
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Vancouver city council voted 5-4 against a motion brought forward on April 16 by Councillor Pete Fry on behalf of the city's Renters Advisory Committee that sought to expand Broadway Plan tenant protections across the city. The Broadway Plan protections provide existing renters with the right to a replacement unit at a similar rent to their previous unit plus interim rent top-up support during the redevelopment of their buildings.
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The city's general policy, however, does not include these specific protections, and tenants elsewhere in the city are at greater risk of being displaced into core housing need (i.e., unaffordable, substandard, or overcrowded housing) through the redevelopment of their buildings.
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The co-chairs of the Renters Advisory Committee, Nick Poppell and Colleen Wickstrom, both made presentations to council describing the challenges of tenants facing displacement and urged them to approve this motion in order to help protect tenants in other areas of the city not covered by the stronger policy.
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But Councillor Mike Klassen, and the rest of the ABC councillors present at the meeting, found these arguments unconvincing. Indeed, Klassen cited Landlord B.C. CEO David Hutniak's concerns that the costs of the Broadway Plan protections on developers were preventing projects from pencilling out and moving forward.
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Klassen argued that the best rental protections are to continue increasing the supply of new rental housing as much as possible and that expanding the Broadway Plan protections across the city risked conflicting with this goal amidst challenging market conditions for new development.
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Councillor Lucy Maloney countered that, while new supply is important, tenant rights should be seen as an essential part of the city's housing policies and not an option to include or remove depending on market conditions.
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Furthermore, Councillor Sean Orr argued that the focus should not just be on expanding the Broadway Plan protections across the city but also on further strengthening the protections themselves — such as by removing potential loopholes that could allow developers to avoid their obligations to tenants.
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On the other hand, we can strengthen tenant protections to prevent displacement, but this makes it harder for redevelopment projects to pencil out and move forward, which limits the growth of much-needed housing supply in our region.
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