Lucy Maloney on enforcing renter protections
Vancouver has put renter protections in place. Now let’s enforce them. Op-ed by Lucy Maloney, Georgia Straight.
Lucy Maloney running for city council with OneCity (Christine Boyle's party) in the April 5 by-election. I thought it was a great op-ed.
As area plans go, the Broadway Plan surely is ambitious: nearly 140 projects in the development pipeline, representing tens of thousands of units. It is not a secret that Vancouver suffers from a profound shortage of housing, and more homes are a good thing.
But the Broadway Plan area is full of renters, many of whom live in low-rise apartment buildings with relatively affordable rents thanks to long tenures.
An area resident may be forgiven for thinking: yes, we need housing. But why does all of it have to be built here?
The answer is a simple one. Under mayor Ken Sim, with only a few exceptions, like the area around certain Skytrain stations, it’s only legal to build a new apartment building on top of an older one. And there are lots of apartment buildings in the Broadway Corridor.
To be fair to Sim, this has been the status quo in Vancouver for a long time. But he’s defended that status quo.
In particular, Sim rejected Christine Boyle's proposal to allow more housing in Shaughnessy. OneCity also advocates for allowing six storeys across the city.
On enforcing tenant protections:
We are where we are. We are in a housing emergency, and to create a more affordable and more livable future, we must build housing. It is on us to ensure that present renters do not lose out to build homes for future renters.
The City of Vancouver does have renter displacement protections in place, and there are enhanced protections within the Broadway Plan area. But there is no department of the City that is specifically charged with enforcing these protections and development does not only occur in the Broadway Plan area. Renters in all neighbourhoods deserve enhanced protections.
If there is a breach of these protections, who should tenants call? If there is a breach, even after construction has started, what avenues do tenants have to seek redress?
These are questions that do not have immediate answers — not to housing advocates, and not to tenants who have not yet had developers come knocking.
But they should.
The City of Vancouver must enforce its own rules. And it must provide a clear, visible pathway for tenants to seek redress if they are wronged.
Maloney proposes bringing back the Renter Office, abolished by Sim, and having it proactively monitor the tenant relocation plan for each project. (Instead of a complaints-based system that only responds to problems after they occur and people have already lost their homes.)
Like pushing down on a balloon
Massive Jericho Lands development will be 20-times denser than its neighbourhood, architect says. Douglas Todd, based on an interview with Brian Palmquist.
This is an excellent example of what Lucy Maloney is talking about.
We have people who want to live and work here, and other people who want to build housing for them. We have limited land, so we need to build up. But there's always tremendous local opposition (exemplified by Douglas Todd, Brian Palmquist, and TEAM), even when you're talking about a large parcel of land that's mostly empty, like the Jericho Lands.
The result is a terrible housing shortage, resulting in people being forced to move away; and massive pressure to build more housing where apartment buildings already exist, again resulting in displacement.
Don't compare it to the neighbourhood of before; might as well compare that to the farmland before that.
Compare it to Hong Kong. I am prepared to admit Hong Kong has way high density. As long as it is <70% of the Hong Kong density, it's probably pretty livable.