[whatnext]

The NPA of the Ninetoes took decisive action to stop the demolition of rental stock, why is Council dragging their feet now?

...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...

...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 said more than 2,000 apartment units, most of them rentals, have been demolished since 2008 in the city of Vancouver; with almost 1,300 of those demolitions happening in 2017 and 2018...

..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.”...

...Even though about 2,000 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.”..

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news...elled-by-demovictions-and-gentrification