A view of East Hastings street in Downtown Eastside of Vancouver in January, 2023.JENNIFER GAUTHIER/Reuters
Legislation the province is expected to introduce this week will allow the City of Vancouver to restrict landlords of single-residential-occupancy rooms from raising rents between tenancies.
The legislation, aimed specifically at privately owned SROs on the city’s Downtown Eastside, is an effort to grant the city unique powers after two court cases over the past two years concluded the city couldn’t pass such rules on its own.
Councillor Rebecca Bligh, who has worked closely with Downtown Eastside groups on housing solutions, said higher rents could have added an extra 1,000 people to those already living in parks and on the street and she called that untenable.
“We needed to stop the hemorrhaging,” she said.
The province’s renter-protection laws currently say that landlords can only raise rents by a designated amount for existing tenants. That amount is set each year. But, if a tenant moves out, the owner can set the rent at whatever number they think they can get.
The cheap hotel rooms that house some of the city’s poorest are frequently run down and sometimes squalid, but advocates for the tenants acknowledge they are better than tents on the street. But SRO rooms have been steadily lost over the years as owners tried to force out existing tenants so they could re-rent them at much higher rates, particularly to international students.
The City of Vancouver put a bylaw in place in December, 2021, to restrict rental increases between tenants for rooms under $500 a month – the province’s welfare shelter rate. The city also set up an office that required landlords to provide information on rent rolls. But the policy was overturned by the Supreme Court and later the B.C. Court of Appeal, which ruled the city had overstepped its authority by bringing in the bylaw.
The province agreed to step in after city staff showed how dire the numbers are. The legislation is to be introduced Wednesday.
“I think the impact is going to be profound. It is going to cool the market for investments. It’s the start of a good new trend,” said Wendy Pedersen, the executive director of SRO Collaborative Society, which works with tenants to help them advocate for their rights.
Ms. Pedersen and Jean Swanson, a veteran housing activist, said statistics showed that the cheap hotel rooms in the Downtown Eastside were being lost at a far greater rate than the governments at various levels could replace them with social housing.
Ms. Swanson said detailed investigations done by the Carnegie Housing Project and First United Church show that the loss of the rooms is one of the direct causes of rising homelessness in Vancouver.
A report earlier this year showed that there were 3,150 people getting welfare who had no fixed address. Ms. Swanson said that’s now up to 3,500.
The Downtown Eastside has about 6,500 residential hotel rooms. City staff say there are about 3,600 rooms in 88 buildings run by private operators. While some are well-run and not trying to extract the maximum rent, there are others operating quite differently, said Ms. Pedersen
She said three hotels that had provided housing for a couple hundred people were emptied out in the last year after the court quashed Vancouver’s bylaw.
“We lost a lot of property then – we call it the Armageddon window,” she said.
In a memo to council in 2022, city manager Paul Mochrie said it was clear some landlords were planning to aggressively evict and target their units to a new, higher-playing clientele.