The People’s Plan is a radical re-envisioning of what a community plan truly needs to be. The People’s Plan is much more than a plan for city zoning laws; it also outlines what a community must do to protect vulnerable community members and actively fight for a world without the harsh profit-driven policies and governance that leave low-income people in constant housing insecurity.
Continue reading at the People’s Plan for Metrotown website.
*Metrotown Community Rally & Paint-in Against the Silver Avenue Demovictions*
When: Wednesday May 31st 2017 5pm to 7pm
Where: Corner of Beresford and Silver Avenue (Just south-west of Metrotown Skytrain Station)
The rally will include a few speakers from the community, and the paint-in will paint anti-demoviction and pro-community slogans and art on the evicted building. Paint and brushes will be provided, although you’re welcome to also bring your own.
Two years ago, Belford Properties bought the two large apartment buildings at the corner of Silver Avenue and Beresford. The City of Burnaby granted Belford Properties a rezoning permit, which allows them to build the “Sun Towers Metrotown.” This two-condo-tower, championed as the “luxury… beacon of cosmopolitan sophistication”, will not house the more than 200 residents displaced from their community by this development, and who cannot afford to buy or rent a new condo. Adding insult to injury, Belford denied recent residents (who accounted for the majority occupants of the buildings) the full eviction compensation they are due following a demoviction in Burnaby.
The City of Burnaby’s rezoning permit awarded Belford Properties the power to demolish 105 units of low-end market housing, even though low-end market housing units are the most important stock for City governments’ to protect. Here on Silver Avenue the demovictions are a tragedy for the residents who were evicted into the unknown; it’s also a tragedy for all 6,000 renters at risk in the Metrotown area who are watching their community crumble around them; and it is a tragedy for all working-class people throughout the Lower Mainland, who are losing still more rental apartments in an already scarce rental stock and in the midst of a vacancy-rate crisis.
The future is perilous for the remaining apartments in the Metrotown area. Burnaby council is setting up to pass their “Downtown” Metrotown development plan, which will rezone the entire area between Central Park and Royal Oak, and Kingsway and Imperial. If this plan passes, we will see a development spree. Condo developers have been holding onto their rezoning proposals in hopes this Plan will pass because then new development guidelines will streamline and fast-track their zoning proposals. Our rally and paint-in also speaks out against Mayor Corrigan’s Metrotown mass-displacement plan, in this new era of demovictions on steroids.
Stop Demovictions Burnaby invites you to join the Metrotown Community Rally & Paint-in to celebrate our resilience, offer moral support to the demovicted residents, and illustrate to the City of Burnaby that we will not go quietly! We pledge ourselves to stand up and fight against another building to be lost to corporate greed.
On Tuesday, April 25th Stop Demovictions Burnaby Released our 2017 Provincial Election Housing Report Card, which evaluates each major political party on their (in)action in regards to demovictions, social housing and protecting renters, and emphasizes that no party is taking bold enough action on these issues. We have created this report card because we want to support Metrotown residents’ understanding of who the candidates are and what they represent.
The BC provincial election is taking place in the middle of a homelessness and housing crisis, and yet we continue to see the same weak, status quo, market-based band-aid solutions from the Liberals, NDP and Greens. No party has offered struggling communities the non-market solutions necessary to address the housing and homelessness crisis.
After 16 years, the legacy of the BC Liberals is one of unrelenting market development, leading to an ever widening inequality gap, and an ever-increasing number of homeless people, and low-income tenants losing their homes. Social services funding has been gutted, and welfare rates have remained frozen. Every year of the past four years, the province has broken a new record on homelessness. The BC Liberal new platform, just like the old platform, has nothing to offer to renters and low-income people.
Although the NDP position themselves as the opposition to the Liberals, they cater to the same developer-profiting, gentrification-inducing housing market. While the Green party has promised $750 mil per year to construct a range of non-market housing, the NDP proposes a maximum of $265 mil per year on “housing affordability programs and new renters’ rebate”. After taking the $400 per year renter’s rebate into account, there will be little left over to build the non-market housing that low-income communities need.
The policies of Mayor Corrigan of Burnaby and his party the BCA, which is a junior affiliate of the NDP, have created the demovictions crisis in Metrotown and displaced thousands of renters. The NDP’s silence on these demovictions, are evidence that the NDP is also not interested in the renters and the working class.
Neoliberal government policies like these leave renters in precarious positions, as Matthew Hunter understands all too well. He spoke out about his struggles with finding stable and affordable housing, having moved four times in the past six years. Matthew was demovicted from his previous Metrotown apartment, and now lives in another apartment in the neighbourhood, under constant threat of demoviction. He spoke of landlord neglect, as his landlords ignore building maintenance because of predicted building demolition and big cheques coming their way, regardless of how many cockroaches and rats current tenants have to put up with. He criticized government inaction, calling out the NDP’s false pretense of being a party that wants to help the working person.
Ultimately, the report card makes it clear that market-based solutions will not solve the housing crisis. Building more owner-purchase condos and subsidizing developers through a “renter’s rebate” as the NDP has promised will not solve the housing crisis. Catering almost entirely to prospective home-owners, as the Liberals do, will not solve the housing crisis. These “solutions” will at best maintain the status quo of mass displacement and poverty, and at worst will pull us deeper into a crisis that is already drowning low-income renter communities.
Stop Demovictions remains steadfast in our demands. We need a provincial government that will: Restrict cities’ ability to destroy low-end of the market housing through developer-friendly upzonings. Stop landlord discrimination of renters based on race, sex, social class, age and ability and reform the RTB so that the landlords should have to apply in order to evict tenants. Implement rent control that stops rent increases on the unit regardless of tenancy. Commit to building 10,000 units of social housing every year in BC in order to end homelessness.
Read and download the full Stop Demovictions Housing Report card here.
Townhall to discuss the BC election and the struggle against demovictions
When: Wednesday, May 3rd, 6:30pm
Where: Burnaby Neighbourhood House (4460 Beresford Street)
The 2017 BC election is taking place during the heights of a housing and homelessness crisis, yet none of the Parties have centred their campaigns on an adequate response to these crises. No one said: if elected, we promise to end homelessness. On the other side of the fence, on the ground in our communities, we have never stopped fighting for housing justice and tenant security. The election has exposed the inability and unwillingness of the electoral parties to really grapple with the housing crisis; our communities cannot afford to wait for them to change.
Come to a townhall organized by the Stop Demovictions Burnaby campaign where speakers will address the failure of the major parties to end the housing crisis, present part of the People’s Metrotown Plan that envisions the housing we need, and propose a plan for our community’s struggle for homes and against demovictions after the BC election is over and politics as usual continues in Victoria. Our housing report card describes what we need governments to do to end the housing crisis; what remains is to decide what we, on the ground in our neighbourhoods will do to win those changes, and defend our communities.
2017 BC ELECTION:
Housing, Homelessness and Demovictions Report Card
For two years the Stop Demovictions Burnaby Campaign has been fighting to expose the issue of demovictions in Burnaby as a threat to renters in all of Metro Vancouver, and to stop the City of Burnaby from rezoning and demolishing the 3,000 units of low-end of market apartment buildings in Metrotown. Demovictions are displacing working class renter communities and replacing us with empty luxury condos.
The City of Burnaby’s bullish rezoning of Metrotown has turned this neighbourhood into a haven for developer greed and pushed hundreds of people into unsafe, unaffordable, insecure housing or into homelessness. In 2016 three separate independent reports cited loss of low-end of market rentals as a major contributor to homelessness, which Metro Vancouver’s 2017 homeless count puts at a record high of 3,605 people.
Demovictions are the direct responsibility of municipal governments, which hold the unique power to set the conditions for or refuse the rezoning applications that condo towers need. But the housing and the homelessness crisis resulting from demovictions are responsibility of all levels of government. Stop Demovictions Burnaby has studied what each party/candidate has to offer to the people of Metrotown in the 2017 BC election on the issues of demovictions, social housing supply, and protecting renters.
The question we ask is “which candidate will stop the mass demolition and displacement of Metrotown and improve renters’ lives?” We need a candidate who will break from the pro-market and anti-people legacy of the Liberals, and take a public stance against the demoviction rezoning and planning policies of Burnaby City Hall. We have included our analysis of party positions and the record of each Burnaby Deer Lake candidate in this respect.
In the summer of 2016, while demovicted residents squatted a mass-evicted building apartment building in the Metrotown neighbourhood of Burnaby, NDP leader John Horgan and housing critic David Eby held a news conference a municipality away in Coquitlam. Rather than addressing the civic zoning and gentrification issues at the root of the demovictions crisis (or the shortage of social housing that forces low-income people into precarious market rentals), Horgan and Eby blamed the Residential Tenancy Act, which has nothing to do with demovictions, but which the NDP does plan to reform (in unrelated ways) in their election platform.
BC Liberals policies of social housing cuts and real estate growth-at-any-social-cost are responsible for this week’s high homeless count. The NDP pretends to offer an alternative to this socially destructive twinning of growth and cuts, but their housing policies do not propose any real change. As the 2017 BC election launches, the NDP still doesn’t have a social housing platform, and their support of Burnaby demovictions show that, like the BC Liberals, they too are the party of growth and cuts.
NDP backing BCA’s homeless creating policies
The NDP is silent on demovictions in Burnaby because Burnaby’s governing civic party, the Burnaby Citizen’s Association (BCA), is an NDP municipal affiliate. Over the past two years, as the scope of the Burnaby demovictions crisis became clear, the BC NDP has been able at any time to intervene in their junior affiliate’s policies and reverse Mayor Corrigan’s development at any cost policies. Instead, Horgan and Eby parrot the same misinformation as Burnaby’s demovictor-in-chief, Mayor Corrigan, that Cities don’t have the power to stop rezonings and demolitions.
In the last year, Corrigan and co. have pushed ahead with a region-wide rezoning policy, the “downtown” Metrotown plan, which will guarantee the demolition of 3,000 units of “low-end of market” apartments. In the midst of a housing crisis, this is exactly the housing stock that independent reports call for cities to protect. Yet the NDP has remained silent on demovictions, silent on Corrigan’s “downtown” Metrotown plan, and have stood steadfastly beside their colleague, with their backs to the demovicted.
NDP demovictions housing policy is corporate growth at any social cost
The NDP has chosen Anne Kang as their new legislative candidate in the Metrotown are of Burnaby. As a Burnaby Councillor, Anne Kang has voted to demovict 473 units of low-end of market rental apartments since 2011 and has not raised an objection on the 296 more demovictions currently in process. Kang has greenlit every demoviction rezoning that has come before council. Demoviction rezonings represent a market-driven housing policy that is centred on incentivizing development at all costs. By embracing Anne Kang as the replacement candidate for MLA Kathy Corrigan, Horgan’s NDP is recognizing and affirming BCA’s development at any cost as part of their Provincial housing policy.
Vulnerable tenants made more vulnerable by NDP demovictions
Residents of 105 units of rezoned apartments on Silver Avenue are typical victims of NDP demovictions. They are losing their homes thanks to the NDP/BCA’s free market betrayal of the working class and Indigenous tenants, and BC Liberal austerity governance policies. These tenants, mostly new immigrants, racialized people, young families, and people with disabilities, are “replacement,” temporary tenants, who Anne Kang and the BCA have decided do not count and cannot be protected with Burnaby’s “Tenant Assistance Policy.” Some tenants have experienced mental health crises and hospitalization due to the stress of the impending demoviction. They had nowhere to go but an apartment scheduled to be demolished and now they have nowhere to go at all. They are amongst the most vulnerable to homelessness. They are the ones Kang, the BCA, and the NDP are sacrificing to a demovictions development policy that, if elected, they will continue to deploy Province-wide.
Unless the NDP turns away from demovictions today, we can be sure that tomorrow John Horgan will “grow the economy” at any social cost, just like Christy Clark and Gordon Campbell have for the last 16 years. We call on the NDP to invest Provincial tax dollars to build 10,000 units of new social housing (independent non-market apartments with built-in subsidies down to welfare/pension rates) every year in BC, to use Provincial legislation to freeze rents and implement rent controls between tenancies, and to recognize low-end of market apartments as an emergency housing stock and declare a province-wide moratorium on apartment demolitions until the non-market housing we need is built and available.
When: 6.30pm, Tuesday, November 29
Where: Russian Hall (600 Campbell Ave)
*Accessibility info at bottom*
SPEAKERS:
何盈欣 Beverly Ho, Chinatown Action Group
Hessed Torres, Migrante BC
Ivan Drury, Alliance Against Displacement and The Volcano newspaper
Natalie Knight, Yurok, Alliance Against Displacement and The Volcano newspaper
馮葉 Stephanie Fung, Chinatown Action Group
What is the role of foreign investment in the Lower Mainland’s current housing crisis? Politicians across the political spectrum point the finger of blame at foreign investors. But their solutions don’t change the profit-driven housing market that leaves renters and homeless people out in the cold. This explanation has trickled down and sometimes we hear low-income, homeless, and evicted people also blaming “foreigners” for their evictions and homelessness.
“Foreign” is a racially charged category that is used to represent certain racialized and displaced communities, such as low-income and working class Chinese, and newcomer refugees. The all too common belief that “foreigners” bear the responsibility for our housing crisis reflects a long history of anti-Asian racism in Canada, and particularly in B.C. It also buys into the idea that local capitalists are somehow preferable to capitalists who may originate in other countries.
But foreign investment and its role in the housing crisis is much more complicated than the mainstream media and dominant political parties would lead us to believe. For the great majority of us, the housing crisis means that we live under constant stress, that we work way too much to make rent, that we are always at risk of being evicted by landlords and developers. And it means homelessness. The dominant political parties are cynically playing to our anxieties while creating legislation that only represents the interests of landlords, not renters, not those of us crushed by a lifetime of mortgage debt, and certainly not the homeless.
This forum presents alternative perspectives to the foreign investment myth by building an anti-imperial critique that acknowledges Canada’s role as an imperialist country in a global market. This critique will weave together three main themes: 1) British Columbia as a settler province constructed through the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands, an ongoing act of dispossession that constitutes the first “foreign invasion;” 2) the history of anti-Asian racism in B.C., and the role anti-Asian racism plays in the current foreign investment myth; and 3) the role of private property and global capital in the current crisis, and alternatives for both understanding and building solutions to the housing crisis in B.C.
In the interests of countering the dominant narratives that have framed and limited how we think about this housing crisis, Alliance Against Displacement and the Chinatown Action Group have prepared a package of articles that frame a background to this forum. This is not required reading for participants, but we want to share the package that we developed between our groups in preparation for this event. Download the reading package here.
We will have coffee, tea, and light snacks available throughout the event. We are working on securing simultaneous translation in Cantonese and Mandarin.
The forum is taking place on the unceded coast salish territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Wauthuth) and Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) peoples.
*Accessibility Info*
The forum is being held in the main upstairs hall. Entry through the front door is accessible by a wheelchair ramp and there is an elevator to the second floor. The wheelchair accessible bathrooms are downstairs and accessible by the elevator.
Childcare is available onsite in a separate room. Please RSVP organize@stopdisplacement.
Co-organized by Alliance Against Displacement and Chinatown Action Group
Alliance Against Displacement
Website: http://
Email: organize@stopdisplacement.
Chinatown Action Group
Facebook page: www.facebook.com/
Email: chinatownactiongroup@gmail
In November 2016, West Coast LEAF wrote to Burnaby’s City Councillors and Mayor Derek Corrigan to urge them to take into account the possible consequences of displacement from rental housing for vulnerable residents, particularly women and their children, as they consider the Metrotown Development Plan. West Coast LEAF explained why women and children’s safety and economic security are at stake in civic government decisions impacting housing security and called on Burnaby to protect the affordable housing that does exist within the municipality.
The Stop Demovictions Burnaby Campaign needs your help! As early as the end of November, Burnaby City Council plans to vote on a new development plan for Metrotown. If they pass it, the majority renter, lowest-income neighbourhood in Burnaby will be terminated with the stroke of a pen. The new plan will designate three thousand apartment units in Metrotown for rezoning by raising their legally allowable building heights from three to twelve (or more) stories. This Plan will demovict and displace more than 6,000 renters and further diminish the lower mainland’s shrinking rental stock by handing them over to condo development corporations for massive profit. But it is not too late to stop this catastrophic loss of rental apartments.
Now is the time to stop the Metrotown Plan. There are three things you can do to help.
1) Endorse the messages from Metrotown renters
We are asking for your community group, union, or faith group to write to organize@stopdisplacement.ca to endorse the following message:
2) Sign and circulate the petition for a moratorium on demolitions of rental housing
The Stop Demovictions Burnaby Campaign has petitioned door-to-door and on the street in Metrotown and we hope to submit our petition to Burnaby Council with the call to stop the new plan. While our focus for the fall is on stopping the Plan, demovictions have become a crisis under the old plan so we also must continue to call for a moratorium on Burnaby’s rezonings of rental apartments.
Sign and circulate this petition: https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Burnaby_Mayor_Derek_Corrigan_City_Council_Place_a_moratorium_on_demolitions_of_rental_apartments_in_Burnaby/edit/
3) Promote and march in the demonstration on November 12
We are calling for a big demonstration on Saturday November 12 to give a message that there is widespread opposition to the “Downtown” Metrotown Plan, and that it is more than a Burnaby issue.
We are asking supporters to circulate the call-out and poster, to make your own banner, and to come march together to save three thousand homes.
Demovictions are displacement
Since the spring of 2015 the Stop Demovictions Burnaby Campaign has organized against the site-by-site loss of purpose built rental apartments in the Metrotown area. Hundreds of rental apartments have been or will soon be demovicted – evicted by demolition – for expensive condo towers, pushing over a thousand people out of their homes and their community. Faced with soaring rental costs, low vacancy rates, and landlord discrimination, some residents – particularly racialized people and women with children – are forced into hidden homelessness, moving onto friends couches or into their cars. Although Burnaby’s Mayor and Council grant permission for demovictions through their rezoning powers, they consistently refuse to recognize that their policies are creating a crisis for hundreds of people vulnerable to forced displacement and homelessness.
Demovictions on steroids
As bad as Burnaby’s site-by-site rezoning policies have been, Council’s proposed “Downtown” Metrotown Plan will be much worse. The proposed Plan will streamline rezonings for city bureaucrats by providing a legal policy for the whole area (from Boundary to Royal Oak and Kingsway to Imperial), and certainty for investors by laying out a legal guarantee that if they buy the properties and meet the conditions, they can have their towers. City planners acknowledge that there are nearly 3000 rental units in low-rise apartment buildings in this area, and the proposed up-zoning of these homes will directly cause the displacement of approximately six thousand people. The “Downtown” Metrotown Plan will be demoviction on steroids.
More than a Burnaby issue
The mass rezoning and condoization of the Metrotown area will also affect the housing security of renters throughout the whole lower mainland. A recently released report on affordability and homelessness in Vancouver shows that extremely low vacancy rates are pushing rental costs upwards, and this is most acute at the lower-rent range. With a BC Housing waiting list of over 10,000 and a rapidly diminishing number of lower rate rental units available, more and more people are forced into homelessness or unhealthy, precarious shelter options. Meanwhile in Burnaby, the “Downtown” Metrotown Plan will threaten the demoviction of three thousand units of purpose-built apartment units from the lower mainland’s already stressed rental housing stock during this housing crisis.
Stop Demovictions Burnaby Campaign
http://stopdisplacement.ca/burnaby | organize@stopdisplacement.ca
At the end of November, Burnaby Council will vote on the future of every resident of low-rise apartments in the Metrotown area. If Council passes the proposed Metrotown Plan update, they will “up-zone” every rental apartment between Boundary and Royal Oak, and Kingsway and Imperial for condo towers that will not be affordable for the current residents.
The Metrotown Plan will immediately impact the approximately six thousand people living in buildings inside its zone, and then it will affect every renter in the lower mainland as we lose 3,000 purpose-built rental apartments from our already strained, near-zero vacancy rate rental stock.
Mayor Corrigan’s council has ignored and denied the demovicting effects of their rezoning policies so far, so we know it will take pressure to stop the plan. It is not too late to stop the Metrotown Plan – join those facing eviction to save their three thousand homes! Together we march to demand:
Demovict the plan; Save 3000 homes! Burnaby Council must reject the “Downtown” Metrotown Plan and start from scratch with participation of the affected community to develop a “regional growth plan” that doesn’t displace established residents. Lower mainland renters can’t handle the loss of three thousand apartment units.
Placement before displacement! Hundreds of renters are already scheduled to be evicted through rezonings permitted under Burnaby’s old Metrotown plan and approved by City Council, and they report that Burnaby’s existing tenant relocation supports are inadequate. We call on Burnaby council to ensure every renter is placed in new housing they can afford before they are displaced from their existing homes.
Organized by the Stop Demovictions Burnaby Campaign
http://stopdisplacement.ca/burnaby
organize@stopdisplacement.ca
Twitter: @stopdisplacemnt
Facebook: Against Displacement