Broadway Plan Redevelopments 

What to do about the redevelopment sign in front of your home?

Many tenants living in the Broadway Plan area (Vine Street to Clark Drive and 1st Avenue to 16th Avenue) are facing notices that their homes will potentially be redeveloped. 

Our aim here is to provide advice to tenants about what to do if they receive a Broadway Plan redevelopment notice. If you do not live in the Broadway Plan area or require more general information about renovictions and demovictions, please see the link below: https://www.vancouvertenantsunion.ca/renoviction_demoviction_rights

1. Know your Rights: Broadway Plan Tenant Protections

If you have a notice for redevelopment, it is essential to know your rights. The Broadway Plan expands on the existing Tenant Relocation Plan Policy (TRPP) as well as legislation around evictions covered in the Residential Tenancy Act, the legislation that governs tenancies in BC.

See section 12.1 “Tenant Stability and Protections” of the Broadway Plan. https://guidelines.vancouver.ca/policy-plan-broadway.pdf for more information

2. Understand and Secure Your Rights 

It’s one thing to know your rights. It’s another thing to secure those rights and protections, understand their limitations, and not move until you have secured what you are entitled to. 

The protections offered by the Broadway Plan are not laws. There are guidelines for developers. The City of Vancouver tells us that they will grant permits only if the developers demonstrate they are following the guidelines. 

But there really isn’t a well-established process to ensure developers do not force tenants out nor is there a mechanism in place to guarantee that tenants are given the compensation they are promised. 

Instead, the terms of our evictions are frequently left in the hands of ‘tenant relocation specialists.’ These ‘specialists’ are, as we are now seeing, frequently another branch of development companies. As a tenant who recently moved out of a building said about one of these relocation specialist firms, they felt like they “had to babysit them to get them to do their job.” On the whole, they noted that they “wouldn’t trust them to act in good faith without renters doing a lot of self advocacy” and that they would not “have got anything without pushing for it.” It took this tenant almost three months of constant phone calls, text messages, and emails to receive the compensation they were owed. 

3. Talk To Your Neighbours

After receiving a notice of potential redevelopment, it’s common to feel a sense of panic and hopelessness. Your neighbours will likely be feeling the same. Landlords know this and many use it to their advantage: they may offer an early buyout that does very little to secure future housing or use other methods to coerce tenants to leave early. 

From our experience, the best way to move forward is to talk to your neighbours. This can help you feel less isolated and could prevent landlords from targeting individual tenants. While it can feel awkward at first, the best way to start talking to your neighbours is to just do it: say hi in the hallway, knock on their door to chat, or send a text to that neighbour who once fed your cat.  These small conversations can lead to strong relationships that are the basis of collective action. 

4. Organize Your Building

There are a couple first steps that often work when trying to organize your building. Once you have talked to a few neighbours, consider making a building group chat or email list to stay connected.

Then, organize a meeting! Find a time that works best for you all and invite as many of your neighbours as possible. Once tenants of the building are together, ask questions, learn from each other about the issues in your building and what you are all facing. From there, keep organizing and move together to take collective action to address those common issues. 

An organized building is much stronger than an individual tenant against a landlord. For more organizing tips, check out the “How To Form a Building Committee” guide by the Rent Strike Bargain Campaign.

The Vancouver Tenants Union is a grassroots, volunteer and member-based organization that has many resources to help tenants organize their buildings. Please reach out to [email protected] or find your local chapter email here. 

5. Take Collective Action

Along with building a community, organizing your building allows you to take collective action. This could mean ensuring your building is maintained until it is redeveloped, pushing back against laundry and parking fee increases by your landlord, making sure that all tenants in your building know their rights and only leave on their own terms, or even trying to stop the redevelopment altogether.

6. Know what to expect 

A redevelopment can be a long process. This is particularly true in the Broadway Plan area, where the sheer amount of redevelopment applications creates a backlog of paperwork for City Hall. On the whole, though, the timeline varies. Because it can take so long for a redevelopment to actually break ground, landlords and developers can use this to their advantage as the fewer long-term tenants that exercise their right of first refusal, the more they profit.

With this in mind, and because this process can take multiple years, we encourage people to stay in their home and not leave early. Know that landlords can not give you an eviction notice before they receive all the necessary permits. 

Source: vancouver.ca/files/cov/broadway-plan-vancouver-renter-information-for-market-rental-housing.pdf

7. Know Your Resources

This process is full of uncertainties and unknowns. But because there are so many tenants with redevelopment applications for their buildings across the Broadway Plan area, it’s important to remember that you are not alone and that there are many other tenants you can talk to throughout this process. 

Get connected with your local Vancouver Tenants Union chapter: https://www.vancouvertenantsunion.ca/get_involved

There are also numerous resources out there for people to access: 

Look up active and archived development applications with the city of Vancouver search tool https://www.shapeyourcity.ca/development

If you are in need of legal advice or advocacy, consider contacting one of these organizations https://www.vancouvertenantsunion.ca/advocates 

Read testimonies from tenants organizing against eviction in the Broadway corridor