Douglas Todd: Metro renters pummelled by demovictions and gentrification
“The problem in Metro Vancouver is that affordable rental is being replaced by expensive condos. It’s the history of gentrification,” says UBC geographer David Ley, author of Millionaire Migrants.
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A few years ago, one of the daughters of University of B.C. geographer David Ley, with her husband and child, rented a one-bedroom apartment along the Kerrisdale section of the Arbutus Greenway.
The suite was large by the increasingly shrinking standards of Vancouver. And the rent was reasonable, at $1,100 a month. But now the modest, pleasant-looking purpose-built apartment building on the Arbutus Greenway is under threat. So are hundreds of similar units in rental, co-op and older condo buildings along this corridor.
Change is coming. Developers are moving in, tearing down 1960s, wood-frame walk-up buildings. They’re often replacing them with flashy multi-million-dollar luxury condos. City of Vancouver development-application permit signs are popping up like oversized weeds, suggesting more gentrification will come, ousting renters and others who are in decent housing arrangements.
While Ley’s daughter and family have moved, the veteran urban development specialist worries hundreds of tenants in relatively affordable, relatively roomy accommodation in the four-storey apartment blocks along this strip of Arbutus Greenway will soon be displaced and have few low-cost places to go.
“The problem in Metro Vancouver is that affordable rental is being replaced by expensive condos. It’s the history of gentrification,” Ley said during a recent tour of the stretch of low-rise buildings along East and West Boulevards between 41st and 49th Avenues, an area that is rife with construction and blanked-out windows.
Ley, who has lived in Kerrisdale for decades, appreciates the newly opened Arbutus Greenway, which is bringing in a fresh stream of pedestrians and cyclists. The Greenway is soon to be further adorned with elaborate landscaping, gardens, washrooms and other amenities.
But the Arbutus Greenway also illustrates how taxpayer-funded improvements can gentrify neighbourhoods, Ley said. New amenities draw high-end real-estate developers, who tear down affordable retail outlets and rental and co-op housing and typically erect costlier condos with the aid of artsy marketing slogans.
“This is happening all over the city,” Ley said.
Although the process of gentrification is “really concentrated and happening quickly” in this stretch of fairly pricey Kerrisdale, it has for years also been hitting low-cost rental units elsewhere — especially in Burnaby and Coquitlam.
Here’s a sign of the times: A luxury condo complex facing the Arbutus Greenway in Kerrisdale, at 47th and West Boulevard, has replaced an affordable equity co-operative building. The new 40-unit condo complex, called The McKinnon, recently posted a sign marketing what it said was its last unit.
Asking price: $2.349 million.
Kerrisdale renters Morgan and Jeany Kroon reacted in stark amazement at the condo price tags advertised just across from them on the Arbutus Greenway.
“It seems crazy. Who’s going to be able to pay that?” said Morgan. He and his wife, who both have jobs, rent a 500-square-foot apartment on East Boulevard for $1,300 a month.
They’ve been renting for two years in their wood-frame building, which, along with three others adjacent to it, are now fronted with development application signs. One sign promises a stylish new 45-unit complex.
Many of the units in the buildings on this block were vacant before the city of Vancouver brought in its empty homes tax. But two years ago, Jeany discovered on a Chinese-language website that the developer was renting them.
Earlier this year, the Kroons thought they were going to be forced to move, along with other renters. But in the fast-changing real-estate market, where prices are now falling, the owners recently told the Kroons they could stay and rent for one more year.
Who knows what might happen next for the Kroons and the tenants in similar situations? They know the condos popping up along the Arbutus Greenway, which generally range between $1 million and $2 million, are not an option for them.
‘We’re told rental is the future’
Such uncertainty goes on across Metro Vancouver, which continues to have some of the most expensive housing in the world, even if prices might have peaked last year. Grand condo complexes, both towers and low-rises, are being erected across the region, often marketed to offshore investors.
The ratio of median housing prices to median wages in Metro Vancouver is a crushing 12 to one. Toronto is eight to one; Seattle is five to one. Four to one is considered “affordable.”
Given the chasm between local wages and housing prices, many politicians and others have said residents will have to get used to renting — if they want to live and work in a city that happens to have become highly attractive to the global rich.
“We’re told rental is the future,” Ley said, as he points to another series of 1960s-built residential buildings on East Boulevard that are in a state of flux. “But you wonder how long this block will last. It’s like dominoes falling.”
This eight-block Kerrisdale corridor on the west side of Vancouver — where luxury condo complexes have already been completed, are under construction or are in the planning stages — is full bore into a transition that has already led to the evictions of thousands of renters in other parts of the city.
Craig Jones is a University of B.C. geography PhD candidate who also teaches community data science at SFU’s City Program. He says the Metro Vancouver Housing Data Book reports that 2,182 apartment units, 44 per cent of which were purpose-built rentals, have been demolished since 2009 in the city of Vancouver.
The same thing has been happening at arguably a greater pace in Burnaby, especially in the large hub of low-rise rental buildings that once surrounded Metrotown.
Longtime Burnaby mayor Derek Corrigan was turfed in the fall election because he was seen as doing little to stop hundreds of affordable old rental units being torn down and replaced with costly condos, especially in towers, many of which were pre-sold in Asia.
Almost 1,000 rental units have been demolished in Burnaby since 2012, mostly in the Metrotown region, Jones said. And another 300 units are set to be torn down in the city in the next year or two.
“We’re talking about displacement of some of the most disadvantaged people.”
The demoviction trend has also devastated tenants in Coquitlam.
Jones has been studying how the purpose-built rental buildings in the neighbourhood around the new Burquitlam SkyTrain Station are going through massive redevelopment.
Condo developers are taking advantage of neighbourhoods that are fast increasing in value because of improved transit options, Jones said. But in the process they’re pushing out many, including recent immigrants and refugees.
Coquitlam lost 767 apartments units in the past three years, Jones said. “That’s a huge number. That’s 20 per cent of Coquitlam’s rental stock.”
Jones has led focus groups with refugees from Syria and Bhutan, who had an average of five family members squeezed into their apartments around the Burquitlam SkyTrain Station, which were roomy by developers’ new standards. He believes most of the refugee families forced out of their rental suites were directed into B.C. Housing projects.
New rental buildings are more costly
This is not to say some municipal councils aren’t encouraging more purpose-built rental housing — even if it is much more expensive than the mostly wood-frame walk-ups from which people are being evicted.
More than 4,000 rental units are approved or being built this year for Metro Vancouver’s suburbs, with 7,000 more proposed, according to some reports, said Jones, who notes it can be extremely hard to get reliable data on the destruction and construction of rental units.
Coquitlam and the City of North Vancouver are among those offering density bonuses to developers prepared to build rental units. The City of Vancouver is also making efforts to protect some rental housing in the midst of its extended housing construction boom.
Even though almost 1,000 older rental units have been demolished in the city of Vancouver in the past decade, new ones have been built. Vancouver proper has had a net gain of 3,300 purpose-built rental units since 2008, Jones said. Still, construction is not keeping up with growth in residents, of whom more than one in three rent.
And, significantly, “these new rentals are more expensive,” Jones said.
He’s seen people demovicted and then confronted with a doubling of their rent. “It really depends on the situation. And the data that’s kept on all this is not great.”
Metro Vancouver, with a population of 2.4 million, has the most expensive two-bedroom rental units in Canada, and it’s in fourth place for one-bedroom listings, according to a new report by Rentals.ca. A two-bedroom apartment in Metro now costs close to $3,000 a month, while an average one-bedroom is $1,828.
As Ley takes in a city block filled with older residential buildings along the Arbutus Greenway, much of which has been earmarked for development, he said, “All these people are going to be displaced.”
The author of the book Millionaire Migrants: Transpacific Lifelines, which describes how Asian capital has flowed into Metro Vancouver, says, “These people are going to be displaced into a housing market which has under one per cent vacancy rate. So where are they going to go?”
Four decades ago, Ley was studying gentrification in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano, where similar demovictions were occurring at a rapid clip. Developers were allowed to tear down old character houses in Kitsilano, full of rag-tag rental units, thereby thrusting tenants toward more expensive rentals and condos.
“The typical preference for developers since the 1970s has been to put up condos,” Ley said.
Building condos gives developers “much faster return than rentals, which are a long-term investment. You can get your money back quickly with condos and you can invest it in a new project. It’s a much more attractive market in terms of the return rate.”
While renters in old walk-ups have to deal with elevated fear of the demovictions that come with gentrification, Ley notes many real-estate developers often put a high-minded gloss on their tony projects.
Some developers moving into the Arbutus Greenway area are coming up with marketing slogans like “Art lives here” and “Houses inspired by life.” They’re typical examples of the way many developers, Ley said, often “claim to be artsy. They try to tell us, ‘This is not filthy lucre happening here. This is something noble.’”
But behind developers’ exotic-sounding phrases is an economic juggernaut that is leading to further gentrification, especially in desirable gateway cities like Sydney, London, San Francisco and especially Metro Vancouver, which is the most unaffordable of virtually all of them.
How can demovictions be curtailed and affordable rentals built?
It’s hard to know what policies will slow down the gentrification that displaces people from old-style rental units. But alternatives are being put forward.
Jean Swanson, a veteran housing activist elected last fall to Vancouver city council, has taken part in an occupation of a rental building in Burnaby’s Metrotown to try to pressure politicians to put an end to demovictions.
“Burnaby has been atrocious for this. Metrotown has been like a war zone, with all these holes in the ground, full of building cranes,” she said.
Swanson has looked into gentrification along the Arbutus Greenway in Kerrisdale and is going to make a motion to city council in response to it, since she realizes many more purpose-built rental buildings, co-ops and even older condo units along the Greenway are vulnerable to demolition.
“We have a housing emergency and a climate emergency. And the most affordable housing we have is the housing that is already built,” Swanson said.
The city of Vancouver has an official plan that requires one-to-one replacement of existing rental units, which applies to more than half of the city’s purpose-built rentals stock. But the replacement plan doesn’t cover property zoned C2, which is the commercial zoning along much of the Arbutus Greenway between 42nd and 49th avenues.
It’s also the zoning on most Vancouver arterials, including Broadway, Main, Kingsway and East Hastings, where Swanson has talked to people who have been evicted from relatively reasonable rental accommodation to make way for gentrification.
So the Coalition of Progressive Electors councillor will introduce a motion to Vancouver council on June 12th that would require one-to-one replacement of rental stock on land zoned C2. That, she hopes, may put a small dent in the demoviction trend.
What might be another way forward? Its hard to come up with a simple answer in light of sheer economic forces. As Ley says, the last decade’s run-up in the value of property in Metro Vancouver, Toronto and elsewhere encourages developers to tear down old rental stock in hope of making higher profits through condos.
Since Ley began studying demovictions long ago, he’s well aware construction of the purpose-built rental housing constructed in the 1960s and ’70s in Kitsilano, Burnaby, Kerrisdale and elsewhere was underwritten by significant federal tax subsidies for developers. He thinks Ottawa needs to bring back similar subsidies.
This week a revamped Burnaby council initiated some bold moves to protect rental stock.
It proposed bylaws that would would require every suite demolished in Burnaby’s Metrotown and three other centres to be replaced with a similar unit in the same neighbourhood. Council is also looking at allowing displaced renters to move into a new building at the same rent as their previous suite, and compelling builders to include a minimum of 20 per cent rental housing in all new developments.
Although it’s easier said than done, Jones would also like to see developers’ push for increased zoning densities for condos and other dwellings (which leads to greater profits) shared more equally among different kinds of householders.
Instead of mostly up-zoning neighbourhoods with affordable old rental buildings for redevelopment, Jones thinks more emphasis should be placed on allowing more apartment-building developers to move into portions of single-family neighbourhoods, especially those close to SkyTrain stations or busy bus corridors.
Jones also sees hope in what is going in New Westminster.
New Westminster has a large stock of low-cost three- and four-storey rental buildings, including for people on welfare and other means of government support, which it is finding ways to protect through zoning restrictions.
This year New Westminster became the first city in B.C. to apply bylaws that guard existing rental housing stock from demolition — much to the satisfaction of tenants advocates and the disappointment of some developers.
In the meantime, New Westminster council is also busily allowing a spate of luxury highrise condo towers to go up on its fast-changing Fraser River waterfront. “Many developers tell me New Westminster is a great place to do business,” said Jones.
In other words, a more balanced approach to city planning might be possible. It woud allow developers to erect yet more condos at the same time it preserves the purpose-built rental buildings many enjoy living in and can still afford.
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