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Who will fight for renters?

Burnaby anti-poverty group calling on mayor and council to stop demolitions
Rick Erb
Red Tape: Rick Erb, co-chair of ACORN’s Burnaby chapter, stands in front of two apartment buildings in the Maywood area. The building on the left is subject to demolition should Belford Properties be granted a rezoning permit from the city.

A local anti-poverty group is calling on Mayor Derek Corrigan to “marshal his forces” and fight for Burnaby renters, similar to how he’s stood up to the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion.

“I know if he’s got the heart to do that, to protect us from another great oil spill, he is a man of good sentiment,” said Rick Erb, co-chair of ACORN’S Burnaby chapter.

Erb’s comments are in response to a recent Fraser Institute report, which names Burnaby as the second least-regulated municipality in Metro Vancouver when it comes to residential development.

The right-wing think-tank’s study, titled “New Homes and Red Tape: Residential Land-Use Regulation in B.C.’s Lower Mainland,” analyzed 10 cities in various categories, including construction approval times, timeline uncertainty and regulatory costs. Abbotsford ranked No. 1 for having the least amount of red tape, while the District of North Vancouver and Vancouver had the most.

For a developer looking to build in Burnaby, it’ll take close to 11 months to get approval from the city, cost $17,542, and there’s a strong chance the area would have to be rezoned. That’s significantly lower when compared to the District of North Vancouver, which has an approval timeline of 16 months and $40,000 worth of fees.

But as the strongest NDP council in the province, Erb said, the City of Burnaby is doing little to avoid displacing the poor given the influx of development. He added that by being fiscally conservative, council has lost its political idealism in the process.

“Nobody joins the NDP or gets into politics on the left unless they’re idealistic to a certain extent. I think this council just needs to rediscover what they’re all about and figure out what side they’re on,” said Erb.

ACORN, short for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, would like to see Burnaby have an affordable housing strategy and a standards of maintenance bylaw, which would bring in routine inspections to prevent landlords from letting their buildings deteriorate.

“We’re disappointed there isn’t an affordable housing strategy at this point, and we’d like to see something adopted,” Erb noted.

In the last five years, 12 buildings in Burnaby have been bulldozed for a loss of 275 rental units, according to Coun. Colleen Jordan, chair of the city’s planning and development committee. The units have been replaced with 2,048 new strata units and 1,100 more are being built in Metrotown, where no rentals previously existed, Jordan added.

But Erb said the new replacements are significantly more expensive to rent.

“For renters, who are trying to hang on and just stay around the neighbourhood and live their lives, there’s a big difference between affordability and affordability for people who are in the condo market.”

Jordan, meanwhile, said while regulatory costs might be lower than other municipalities on paper, developers usually have to pay more overall.

“In most municipalities, they collect fees from the developers upfront for local infrastructure and eventually, the city spends that on sidewalks, streets, etc.,” she explained. “We make the developers do that as part of the construction process. Our staff have told us in the long run, it’s going to cost the city more 20 years down the road to do that work than if the developer does it now.”

Even though project approval in Burnaby takes 10.5 months, according to the report, Jordan said the timeline is longer than staff is comfortable with. The Southgate neighbourhood master plan, for example, was approved at council’s July 20 meeting, marking four years since the process started, she said.

“If people want to build a house, it shouldn’t take them four months just to get the paperwork done, so we’re trying to speed that process up for them because time is money.”

Corrigan could not be reached for comment at press deadline.