Metrotown residents fight to save their homes from demolition
By KELLY SINOSKI, Vancouver Sun
Metrotown residents are calling on the city of Burnaby to declare an immediate moratorium on the demolition of rental apartments and to find homes for those who have been evicted, saying the move is creating a “hidden homeless” population.
The residents, who are members of the Stop Demovictions Burnaby Campaign, have released a social impact report called A Community Under Attack, which says the city’s plans to redevelop rental properties near Metrotown SkyTrain is creating mass displacement of people who can’t afford to live anywhere else.
And the situation is likely to worsen, they warn, as the city turns Metrotown into Burnaby’s downtown core, allowing buildings of more than 12 storeys to replace the three-storey walk-ups that now provide housing to hundreds of residents, many of them women and single parents, families with young children, people with disabilities, low-wage workers, new migrants and refugees. The study found 55 per cent of those tenants pay more than 30 per cent of their incomes to rent.
“The situation is really desperate because the scale of the demolition is astounding; just hundreds of people being pushed out of the neighbourhood seems like a real disaster,” said report organizer Dave Diewert. “We’re really trying to capture the human cry of these renovictions.”
The report studied a block of apartments bordered by Imperial, Dunblane, Grimmer and Marlborough, where all the buildings are owned by developers and slated for demolition. As of the end of March 2016, the report noted, there were 684 apartment units facing demoviction in Metrotown, with an average of two people in each unit.
Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan argues the city has little choice as the region tries to build denser communities around SkyTrain to accommodate another million people coming to the region by 2040.
The city has made trade-offs, he said, noting that while it builds up around Metrotown, it is preserving single-family communities in other areas, such as the Heights neighbourhood in North Burnaby, which aren’t directly on the rapid transit lines.
He noted the apartment buildings in Metrotown are nearing the end of their life, which means landlords are going to tear them down anyway. Either the city can cash in on the increased density — it requires 20 per cent from developers for social housing — and require rentals housing, or developers can raze the apartments and build three-storey condos that will sell for $1 million apiece.
Corrigan also points the finger at the provincial government, which has repeatedly refused a request by municipalities to rezone areas for rental housing only.
“Either we accept the fact that we have to create more density or we refuse and make it impossible for people to find homes,” he said, noting 30 per cent of all the condos in Metrotown are rental units. “We are more than replacing rental housing. The difficulty is the rental housing isn’t being replaced at the same price.
“We have done study after study to find out what we can do to obtain housing affordability in areas around transit. The price of land has gone up so much that trying to find a place for a family to live for $800 or $900 (a month) is impossible.”
However, residents say the demolitions are happening far too fast, and with little consultation.
Rick McGowan, of the Metrotown Residents’ Association, said the social impact study should have been done by the city before it started allowing those rentals to come down, while there was little notice about the plans to redevelop Metrotown into a downtown centre.
“The sentiment of the people leaving is genuine,” he said. “They feel abandoned. There’s a sense of futility among them that they won’t be able to stay in Metrotown.”
Diewert said the residents would like to see the city slow down and work with residents to come up with a plan, as well as create more social housing on city-owned land.
“They say they have to densify but for people already living there, they’re saying ‘you’re in the way of how we want to create it.’ We feel that’s just completely inadequate.”
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