Housing activists rallied in Burnaby this week in solidarity with an international movement to combat “rent insanity.”
The protesters heeded a call from Berlin’s Mietenwahnsinn, which translates to “rent insanity.” The German activists are leading a movement calling for 200,000 rental apartments to be expropriated and brought under government control.
“This really resonated with the work we do in Burnaby, because one of the main issues in the housing crisis is the overwhelming power of landlords over people and the fact that housing is a commodity used to make profit and is not there to house people,” said Cécile Revaux, an activist with Stop Demovictions Burnaby.
The Alliance Against Displacement offshoot is not making a similar call for expropriation at this time, Revaux said, but the group’s mission is similar to that of Mietenwahnsinn, Revaux said.
The rally started at the Metrotown SkyTrain Station before visiting several sites where renters have been evicted to make way for new developments. The protesters plastered signs advertising new condo towers with tallies of the number of units demolished and people displaced.
They also posted signs shaming developers for displacing people, including slogans such as “Our communities are not commodities.”
According to Stop Demovictions Burnaby, Saturday’s rally was one of 40 such demonstrations worldwide staged in solidarity with the German activists.
Mietenwahnsinn is pushing for a referendum in Berlin that, if passed, would see any landlord with more than 3,000 apartments lose their properties to the city, Reuters reports.
