Renters struggle to find homes as prices climb, availability declines

Joanna Fletcher lives in a one-bedroom apartment on Vancouver’s east side with her 10-year-old son. The building has mice and mould, and her new landlord is threatening eviction.

While she has plenty of reasons to leave, Fletcher says she’s fighting to stay for as long as possible because she can’t afford anything else in the area and leaving would mean disrupting her son’s school year.

“It’s not just like I can pick up and go, there isn’t anything for me to go (to),” she said in a recent interview.

Fletcher isn’t alone in feeling the impact of the housing affordability crisis affecting cities across the country.

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says average rents nationally went up last year by 2.7 per cent to $947 per month.

Meanwhile, the availability of rentals is becoming increasingly limited. The CMHC says the overall vacancy rate for cities across the country was three per cent in 2017, down from 3.7 per cent in 2016.

In its annual report on rental housing, the corporation said the demand for purpose-built rental is outpacing the growth in supply, while the rate of condominiums rented out also declined.

Craig Jones, a PHD candidate in geography at the University of British Columbia, said the situation is largely the result of the federal government’s move away from building rental housing in the early 1990s, combined with the extreme profitability of building condominiums over rentals in the private sector.

The government used to build thousands of units of rental housing annually, and the private sector does not appear to have filled the gap in the years since, Jones said.

Although up to a third of condos are estimated to be rented out by owners, Jones said the rents are typically not as affordable as rental only properties and tenancies aren’t secure because owners can always choose to move back in, renovate or trigger other means of eviction.

Statistics Canada reported last year that nearly a quarter of Canadians spent more than 30 per cent of their income on shelter costs, which is the marker for affordability.

Jones said the statistics are a sign that many people live in precarious circumstances.

“It’s taken us a long time to get here, it’s taken decades of ignoring the system,” he said, adding it would take a least 10 years of government commitments to resolve the problem. “That is something that is difficult to do because it’s expensive and it doesn’t show immediate results.”