In Metrotown, residents fight to save their homes
Community under attack by spate of demovictions, campaign argues
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 the Metrotown SkyTrain station 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,” report organizer Dave Diewert said. “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, the report noted, there were 684 apartment units facing demoviction in Metrotown, with an average of two people in each unit.
Some 62 per cent of people given eviction notices on Feb. 29 could not find a new home within a month, Diewert said. Many are couch-surfing with friends or relatives, which he said are “really metrics for homelessness. What transpires is you’re pushing people into precarious housing.”
Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan argued the city has little choice as the region tries to build denser communities around SkyTrain lines to house another million people coming to the region by 2040.
“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.”
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.
“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.”