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LETTER: Burnaby has always had the 'tools' to improve housing

Editor: Re: Dominant BCA launches campaign, mayor defends housing record , NOW online, Sept. 22 Mayor Derek Corrigan defends his longstanding narrative that council had no tools to avoid Metrotown demovictions. New Westminster begs to differ.
Metrotown skyline
A few old buildings will make way for a proposed Metrotown redevelopment, including a 38-storey apartment tower, which is going to a public hearing in the new year.

Editor: Re: Dominant BCA launches campaign, mayor defends housing record, NOW online, Sept. 22

Mayor Derek Corrigan defends his longstanding narrative that council had no tools to avoid Metrotown demovictions. New Westminster begs to differ. New West’s Secured Market Rental Housing Policy successfully incentivizes the preservation of purpose-built rental stock.

New West council rejects the rezoning of purpose-built rental buildings to higher density or increased height. They recorded no demovictions because, as their former director of development services explained, “most developers abide by New West’s wishes.” 

That property owners maximize the lifetime of rental buildings should stand to reason when the alternative of a premature redevelopment is limited to a similar density and height. Burnaby’s runaround response that a rental building owner could still redevelop the site for strata-titled units under the prevailing zoning has also proven moot in New Westminster. This policy would have discouraged land speculators from taking over Metrotown’s purpose-built rental areas.

New West also explores density transfer to preserve purpose-built rental stock. Now, in Burnaby, we use density transfer to destroy affordable rentals. We allow a developer to turn purpose-built rentals south of Maywood Park into parkland and in return, transfer the freed density to a highrise condo project of that developer north of the park. And to round it up, we earmark the community benefit funds for the construction of an event centre in the vicinity, which, like the park extension, will support that development’s sky-high condo valuations. It does not take an urban designer to imagine ways how Burnaby, too, could have used density transfer to help preserve the ratio of affordable purpose-built rental units to condo units that Metrotown enjoyed at the turn of the century.

(Urban planner) Patrick Condon is right: “The big issue before voters on Oct. 20 is this: Who controls zoning, the citizens or the land speculators?”

Reinhard Schauer, Burnaby