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Despite a B.C. Supreme Court ruling in their favour, renters are still being squeezed out of the market
Moving out of one's home rarely happens without some disruption, but for West End resident Janice Johnston, the timing couldn't have been worse. Johnston, who was grieving the recent death of her husband and had just started a new job, received an eviction notice from her landlord requiring her to vacate her apartment for renovations to her suite. “It was an extremely stressful time and there was no refuge in my home,” she recalls. “There is a protocol to follow at the Residential Tenancy Office (RTO), but you can't just phone up and ask what that is. It's impossible to get through on a phone line and e-mails go unanswered for days, and even weeks — loads of confusing paperwork. Not matters easy to deal with at the best of times, but especially while making funeral arrangements and training for a new job.”
Johnston was a tenant of the Bay Tower apartments at 1461 Harwood Street when West Vancouver-based Hollyburn Properties, notorious for mass evictions, took ownership of the building in 2005. In September 2006, she and other tenants started receiving floor-by-floor eviction notices from the new owners stating that empty suites were required for large-scale renovations. The tenants disagreed with Hollyburn's assessment and saw the proposed renovations — like bathroom fixture upgrades and new window coverings — as cosmetic. Bay Tower tenants were offered the chance to return to their suites post-renovation, but with rental increases that many couldn't afford. (WE reported on a similar situation that unfolded this April at the Glenmore, another Hollyburn-owned building in the West End.)
Johnston tried to fight her eviction at the RTO in Burnaby, but her dispute resolution officer ruled her eviction reasonable because the landlord was planning to refinish the floors. “By then, it was January and [the officer] ruled that two weeks from the day of the ruling was sufficient notice to move out. I panicked,” she says. “That's when I called [Vancouver-Burrard MLA] Lorne Mayencourt. His solution was to email the RTO. By the time they answered my email, I would have been out on the street.”
Johnston counted herself lucky to find a new apartment in so short a time, but she had to pay higher rent and, even worse, give up her dog of 13 years because the new building didn't allow pets. The events have left her reeling. “There is no security at all,” she says of her current housing situation. “I could be evicted tomorrow from my new place for the same reasons.”
Johnston is like thousands of tenants across B.C. who are struggling with the effects of a province-wide rental crisis. The problem is of particular concern in Vancouver's West End, which has a higher concentration of renters than any other area in Canada. Across the province, one-third of all households rent, whereas 82 per cent of households in the West End are occupied by renters. Limited rental stocks that continue to erode due to condo conversions and a glut of renters in the market have caused rents to skyrocket. According to a June 2008 report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives called “Affordable EcoDensity: Making Affordable Housing a Core Principle of Vancouver's EcoDensity Charter,” standard rent on Vancouver's West Side was $2,200 per month at the end of 2007, up 50 per cent from 2004, and more than double the rates of 2000.
“The majority of households in Vancouver are tenants. Everyone is being squeezed and a lot are nervous,” says Martha Lewis, executive director for the Tenant Resource Advisory Centre (TRAC). She's seen many renters move out of the city, fed up with the lack of affordable places to live. “A lot of people just leave Vancouver. They go further out and commute longer,” she says. “If you're a tenant and you're in a lower-paying job, it's hardly worth it to do the commute. We are aware that some of the restaurants and employers who pay lower wages are having difficulty in getting workers in Vancouver.”
Heather (last name witheld at her request), has kept her downtown office job despite being evicted from her Bay Tower apartment two years ago. She has since purchased a small place in White Rock. Although Heather has successfully ‘broken out' of the renter's market by buying a place of her own, she's far less happy in her new neighbourhood. Like many single renters who had lived in Vancouver for years, Heather was pushed out of the rental market because it was no longer affordable. “I miss Vancouver terribly but I won't move back because I can't afford rent anywhere I'd like to live,” she wrote in an email. “I've gained 40 pounds in two years of this stress. And I'm miserable. But I am very thankful I have a home that is clean and safe — more than for many [others], now.”
What was once an easy walk to work for Heather is now a grueling commute. “I have lost contact with so many friends because I'm too tired to visit them in the city on weekends,” Heather wrote. “What happened to the Vancouver we all knew and loved for the last 30 years? These big companies are completely taking over, and the days of affording a modest apartment in Vancouver are gone. It is a tragedy for many people.”
The Vancouver of the late 1970s is indeed a thing of the past, but recent history shows how drastically the market has changed in only the last decade. John Calveley runs AMS Rentsline, a telephone and online rental service for landlords and tenants originally designed to help UBC students find affordable housing. The 10-year-old service is now the busiest it's ever been, with tenants snatching up housing faster than Calveley and his team can take rental ads off the website. “Last summer, we had almost triple the amount of people visiting the website, and we just couldn't keep any [housing] ads on the site,” Calveley says. “Landlords post ads, two days later, they want me to take it off the site.” As affordable student housing becomes increasingly difficult to obtain, Calveley says he's seeing more students in shared units. Martha Lewis sees a similar trend through TRAC, where she's finding more people sharing smaller spaces, or students choosing to stay in their parents' homes.
As Vancouver's rental market becomes increasingly polarized, highlighting vast disparities of wealth in the city, some renters have unified in their fight against unfair evictions and the protection of tenants' rights. Stephen Hammond is a human rights consultant who volunteers with Renters at Risk, a tenants' rights advocacy group borne out of the Bay Towers controversy of 2005.
Hammond, who has been renting his apartment on Chilco Street for 11 years, has spent considerable time in educating renters about their rights and how they're being threatened by changes in the Residential Tenancy Act (RTA) — a provincial legislation designed to protect both landlords and renters. “When [the province] brought in the changes [to the RTA in 2002] which allowed for a three to four per cent [annual rent increase] plus [the] Consumer Price Index, Lorne Mayencourt was the only person in legislature who said, ‘Point of order, I don't think you registered my ‘yay' on that vote,” says Hammond. “This is the guy who's supposed to look after renters. Housing is a gigantic issue throughout the province. I'm tired of hearing my provincial government, with their brochures and their ads saying housing matters, when in fact the Residential Tenancy Act loopholes are creating homelessness.” Hammond added that the $6.00 hourly provincial training wage and $8.00 minimum wage is also holding people back from keeping pace with market fluctuations. In addition, he says higher rental rates are causing people to spend less on local businesses than they might if they weren't so squeezed for cash. “If you've got a restaurant or a theatre or a grocery store, if you've got more of your customers who have to spend more on rent, they're not spending it on you.”
Sharon Isaak is one of the founding members of Renters at Risk (RentersatRisk.ca) and was one of a handful of Bay Tower tenants who appealed their case to the B.C. Supreme Court. After an extensive court battle, Isaak won her apartment back. “When your home is under siege and you don't know what's going on, it shakes you to the core like no other experience does. It's a stress that few very people can live with and fight,” she says, adding that her saving grace was tenants banding together. “If you want to get to know your neighbours, get evicted!” she jokes.
Thanks to her Bay Tower experience, Isaak now recognizes the importance of provincial and municipal legislation for preserving the affordability of rentals in Vancouver. “What I want, and what Renters at Risk wants, is for the government to look at the court cases and look at the decisions that were written, and to implement the right of first refusal to protect tenants, because the legislation is not being interpreted correctly by the Residential Tenancy Branch,” she says.
“And that's the lasting message that I'm taking out of all my eviction battles. We walked the walk, we got the results, and now we would like our results to be incorporated in the legislation because the courts have spoken. They have the power to fix this. They have the power to fix this by the election if they want.”
While the Residential Tenancy Act falls under provincial jurisdiction, Isaak says the upcoming November civic elections will be pivotal in securing an adequate supply of affordable rental stock going into the Olympics.
Vision Vancouver councillor and West End resident Tim Stevenson agrees. “All these things come down to political decisions,” he says. “That's why it will be so important as to who's elected in November 2008, because if you get a pro-development council — and the NPA is a pro-development party and has been traditionally — if you get enough of those people elected within the NPA, then I think there's every likelihood [high-end condo developments instead of more dedicated rental units] will go ahead.”
For Stevenson, there's nothing more important than housing on his political agenda. “The vacancy rate is less than half a percent. The normal ebb and flow of the market is failing because you don't have supply and demand, you just have demand,” he says. “For me, this is the number one issue: housing, affordable housing, not just in the West End and the Downtown Eastside but the city. We've got a real crisis.”
Stevenson's motion on heritage building protection, which touches on affordable rent protection, returns as a report to city council Tuesday, July 8th at City Hall (453 W. 12th), 2 p.m.
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