Full rent control key to saving city’s housing of last resort

Regulations must apply to units, writes Jean Swanson.

Longtime Downtown Eastside resident Tom de Grey, 64, is afraid his landlord will find a way to get rid of him in order to raise his rent. De Grey pays $384 per month for his Keefer Cabins room. When another tenant in the building moved out, the rent was raised to nearly $1,100. Other new tenants pay around $900. The B.C. government last week capped rent increases for existing tenants for next year at 1.4 per cent due to COVID.

De Grey is one of thousands of Vancouverites collecting welfare and disability cheques that provide only $375 monthly for rent. For them, the Downtown Eastside’s single-room occupancy rental hotels are the last resort before homelessness. With current welfare and disability so low, and with thousands on social housing waiting lists, it is crucial to have housing that low-income people can afford. As gentrification of the Downtown Eastside pushes rents up and affordable homes disappear, more will become homeless.

Vancouver city staff are expected to issue a report in October that could determine the fate of de Grey and many like him. The key question is: Can the city come up with legal mechanisms to prevent landlords from raising rents for new tenants? Sometimes called “vacancy control,” this is a crucial component of rent control that exists in Quebec and other places in Canada, but not in British Columbia. This kind of full rent control is key to saving the city’s last-resort housing.

Getting rid of low-rent paying tenants in SROs and raising rents by hundreds of dollars a month is actually a business model for some landlords. To boost the potential sale price, realtors advertise SRO buildings as “micro suites” and boast of proximity to trendy, gentrified restaurants. When the building is sold, the new owner often tries to get rid of existing tenants through evictions or even buyouts. Before being elected to council, as a volunteer at the Carnegie Action Project, I met tenants pushed out of home by landlords offering them $500 to $2,000 to move. These lump sums are hard to resist even when they know it will be quickly eaten up by higher rents over the long term.

To boost the potential sale price, realtors advertise SRO buildings as ‘micro suites’ and boast of proximity to ... gentrified restaurants.

Hundreds of SRO units have already been lost to affordability this way. At hotels such as the Brandiz and the Vogue, rents recently jumped from $500 to $750 a month. At the Arlington and the Persepolis, they went from $375 to $625, or $485 to $850.

How can we protect de Grey and others? For years, the city has asked the province to protect tenants by changing the Residential Tenancy Act to end this practice. In 2017, a city report suggested using business licence bylaws to keep rents low by imposing “higher annual licence fees based on rent structure to discourage rent increases at (tenant) turnover.”

Last December, council passed, unanimously, my motion asking the province to tie rent control to rooms rather than to tenants. When I pressed the matter with Housing Minister Selina Robinson, she said that the province had previously rejected rent control on the unit for the whole province.

That’s why the second part of my motion called for city staff to investigate alternate controls such as business licences. With the province refusing, the city must protect its low-income citizens. New Westminster city council did this, and even won when challenged in court.

I hope the City of Vancouver’s staff can tie rent control to a unit as a condition for keeping or renewing a business licence. I hope for a courageous “can-do” approach to preserving low-income SROs.

SRO accommodation is better than the street, and we have to keep units affordable until we have other housing that low-income people can afford.

Says de Grey: “To me, vacancy control is everything. If we don’t get vacancy control, we’re done.”