After years of negotiating with developers who evict tenants to redevelop their properties, Burnaby city staff have come up with a plan.
City council adopted the tenant assistance plan for rental buildings at Monday night’s council meeting.
“We tried to work with developers as best we can,” Coun. Colleen Jordan, chair of the city’s planning and development committee, told the NOW. “Not all developers will cooperate in that regard. But we do have some leverage.”
The primary issue has been with older walk-up apartment buildings in city centres, such as those in the Maywood area, Jordan explained.
Under the city’s bylaws, property owners are able to demolish and redevelop their property so long as it is done under the existing zoning, she noted.
“There is nothing the city has the authority to do that could stop an existing owner from redeveloping an existing building with a similar building under the existing zoning,” Jordan clarified in an email to the NOW. “Where the city does have authority, is when the owner applies for increased density under an existing community plan. Then council does have the final say.”
The city can attach conditions to rezoning applications, which is where the tenant assistance plan comes in, she said.
The Provincial Residential Tenancy Act has requirements for providing notice to tenants and assistance in relocating them, but the city now has a policy for multifamily buildings that are being demolished that goes beyond that.
If a developer submits a rezoning application involving six or more units in a multi-family building and the developer intends to demolish the units, they must submit a tenant assistance plan, according to the city’s new policy.
The city’s new requirements include a minimum of three months’ notice and three months’ rental compensation to each tenant, as well as offering interested tenants units in the new development or other housing managed by the applicant.
The policy was approved less than a week after a story on land speculation in Burnaby ran in Business In Vancouver, but Jordan pointed out the city has been working on the policy for six months.
Mainland Chinese buyers have been purchasing older apartment buildings in the city and tearing them down to build high-rise condos in their place, according to the article by Frank O’Brien, and buyers have been focusing on the city centres.
There have been 12 demolitions of low-rise apartment buildings in Burnaby in the past five years, Jordan told council on Monday night, affecting a total of 262 rental units.
“The properties that have been demolished in the Metrotown area (along Beresford Street and east of Nelson Avenue) were areas designated in the community plan for the highest level of density, and as such, rezonings were granted to applicants and existing properties demolished,” Jordan wrote to the NOW, regarding the article. “The Metrotown community plan is coming up for review, and the impact on affordable, rental housing will of course be a consideration, among a number of issues. As for now, the majority of the buildings in Maywood, and Edmonds as well, are not eligible for up-zoning.”
Rental units in the Metrotown have increased in total by 300 over the past five years, Jordan said, though the newer units are more expensive than those in the older low-rise apartment buildings.
