The City of Victoria is experiencing rapid change. The urban landscape is becoming an exclusive enclave. For? Residential real estate investors, seasonal retirees, highly-paid professionals and active, lifestyle tourists.
We are witnessing a new gold rush. The usual get-rich-quick schemes reward a few winners, and leave behind a mounting surplus of losses. Developers, planners, politicians, and property-owners all cash in. They promote uncontrolled growth to maximize profits; jeopardize the collective well-being and care for the natural environment.
Victoria’s Market Rental Revitalization Study is the City’s latest plan to identify a large swathe of older, purpose-built rental housing units. More than 10,000 dwellings (40% of the total rental housing stock) are now candidates for demolition and/or redevelopment: as higher-end, higher-density apartment units or luxury-condo complexes and townhomes. An urgent push to ‘revitalize’ older properties in neighbourhoods precipitates the eviction of thousands of tenants.
Six out of ten households in Victoria are tenants; in James Bay, almost 70 percent. More short-term vacation rentals exist than rental accommodation for long-term tenants. This in a city with a less than 0.7%, a vacancy rate, and soaring rents.
Like homeowners, tenants pay taxes. Yet, the City offers few safeguards for renters. Protections such as long-term housing agreements; rental displacement assistance, to ensure safety and health during renovations; or mandatory maintenance requirements for residential dwellings. Municipal representatives treat non-property owners as second-class citizens, or disposables, whose concerns and needs are the responsibility of senior governments.
How is it possible that this prosperous City has a ‘homeless’ problem? Why do thousands of renters face displacement due to demolition and redevelopment? Is it partly due to a hoarding of homes? There exist 3,450 unoccupied housing units in Victoria (almost 7 per cent of the City’s entire housing stock) according to the 2016 Census. In some areas of James Bay, temporarily occupied housing stock represents between 10-20% of all dwelling units.
According to Census Mapper, 57 per cent of James Bay property owners are mortgage-free. Fewer than 20 per cent of home-owners paid more than 30% of their income on shelter costs in 2016. But almost 48% of renters spent more than 30 per cent of their income on housing costs.
The inequality gap continues unabated.
The City streamlines the development process; eliminates minimum size of housing units; reduces parking requirements; relaxes regulations to approve more secondary suites, accessory units, and garden suites. The City also approves conversion of rental apartments to strata properties; and now, licenses short-term rentals as lucrative mortgage-helpers. The result? An exponential growth of—unaffordable, unaccessible housing, depriving families, students, seniors, and working people of their homes. This, to satisfy whose needs?
Affordable, safe and secure housing needs to be a fundamental right available to all residents of our City and its neighborhoods that reflect a thriving and healthy economy. Comprehensive standards of maintenance need to apply to all housing, independent of tenure status. Profit-making growth opportunities must not be used as an argument for sacrificing the needs of one group in society, tenants, in order to subsidize and support another—home-owners.
The Market Rental Revitalization Study is a language-game tool to allow developers, contractors, and real estate investors to carve out certain City areas for redevelopment. This, under the catch-word phrases: ‘rental housing retention,’ seismic upgrading, and energy-retrofitting. Yet, few former hotel properties being refurbished for rental-residential use (such as the Q-Apartments, or the Harbour Towers Hotel in James Bay) include earthquake-proofing as part of their multi-million dollar makeovers.
Many older homes are being converted from affordable multi-suite rental units to short-term tourist accommodation; others are being demolished to make way for high-density, expensive condo units. Tenants are displaced. Who are the unfortunate ‘dislocated’ individuals? Seniors. Students. Retail employees. Citizens with minimal chance of securing accessible and affordable housing in Victoria.
‘Redevelopment’ favours investors over those who live and work in the City. The result? More rezoning? More redevelopment? More luxury condos, garden suites, townhouses, or short-term vacation rentals?
Victoria needs housing geared to the average income of those who live, study, and work here. Period! Demolition and displacement of current tenants and their replacement with higher value tourists and real estate investors cannot and does not resolve the housing crisis.
Rental refugees have become a rising tide of couch-surfers and ex-tenants who live in cars or tents in Beacon Hill Park. This is not a solution. Decent, safe, and affordable housing, is a fundamental need for everyone. This matter is worth discussing—to mitigate the negative social consequences fuelling the growing divide between the haves and have-nots, between uneven economic development giving rise to concentrations of affluence and poverty.
Further Reading:
DeRosa, Katie. Times Colonist, Tenants battling renovictions – and some are winning, 24 August 2018.
Richard Florida, Citylab.com, Gentrification hurts renters more than homeowners, 27 January 2017
Mile Zero Mirror 