The City of Burnaby is in a tough position when it comes to rental housing.
On the one hand, Burnaby council has been working to expand the number of affordable rental housing options in the city. This stems from the Mayor’s Task Force on Housing and has led to a robust tenant assistance policy that helps residents displaced when their rental apartments are torn down and replaced by towers. (I’m using the word robust based on what the TAP says it does, although some people have cast doubt on if this policy is actually effective.)
It also led to the city approving a bunch of new social housing projects and a push to add laneway houses that can be rented out. Whether or not these moves have been significantly effective in making life more affordable is debatable, but my view is that these steps take a long time to implement and at least they are giant leaps compared with the term of the previous council under Derek Corrigan.
But then there is the issue of illegal rental suites in Burnaby. The city is filled with them and they aren’t always popular.
Renters like them because at least something is available to them, even if many of these units are substandard and potentially unsafe. But many homeowners hate them in their neighbourhoods for various reasons, not many of them good. Imagine complaining to the city because renters in illegal suites take up parking on your street. A person could lose their rental home because you didn’t like their parking habits – that seems like an awful stance to take but some do.
The issue, from what the city has told me in the past, is that it has to follow through on complaints about a rental suite being illegal. So the city wants to protect rental housing but it also has to investigate with a process that could potentially end up in the loss of some rental units.
You see the dilemma here?
I’ve been privy to a long email thread between a renter in an illegal suite and the City of Burnaby as it has investigated a house that has multiple suites that aren’t registered or approved by the city.
The city’s responses make clear that it is trying to get the landlord to just bring the suites into compliance with its rules and is not trying to force out the people who are renting them.
What’s apparent in the emails is that the landlord clearly has no understanding of the Residential Tenancy Act and their obligations as a landlord and what’s at stake here. The city is still working with the landlord to bring the units into compliance, but get this – the landlord is actually trying to rent out one of the units that is currently empty even though the city is still investigating them.
That takes a lot of gall and is a good example of the difficult situation the city is in as it pursues its goals of protecting the rental supply.
Follow Chris Campbell on Twitter @shinebox44.
