Prices stick Vancouver renters with roommates, family longer than they’d like

Edith Garrido/Submitted

“Housing in the Age of Inflation” is a Daily Hive Urbanized feature series where we speak with renters and homeowners in Metro Vancouver about how meteoric interest rate hikes, ballooning rents, and lack of availability are impacting them. Have a story to tell? Email us at [email protected]

Sky-high housing prices in Metro Vancouver are forcing many renters to live with roommates and family longer than they’d like, as the dream of owning a home — or even renting a private space — gets further out of reach.

Edith Garrido lives with her sister and both their husbands in a Kerrisdale house. The two couples found the home five years ago for $3,500 per month, and know it’s a good deal.

But Garrido doesn’t want to live with family forever. She’s craving a private space with her husband and two dogs — and doesn’t know how she’ll afford that without leaving her job and moving to Chilliwack.

“You always want to have your privacy, even if it’s family,” she said.

Edith Garrido (far right) lives with her sister and both of their husbands in a Kerrisdale home. (Submitted)

“It’s silly things like having a bit of music or something on the TV and keeping the noise down,” she said. “It’s not like an apartment where your unit’s contained and there’s acoustic insulation. It’s a single-family home and we all want to have our separate lives. But we’re making do. I mean, this city’s expensive.”

This year, her landlord declined to renew the foursome on a year-long lease, instead going month to month. She’s concerned an eviction notice may be coming this year. Ideally, her next step would be to buy property with her husband — but that’s unattainable.

Ten years after arriving in Canada from Mexico, even after gaining her citizenship and landing a good job in her field with the City of Vancouver, Garrido says her budget is more strained than she’d like and knows expensive housing will only make things worse.

“It’s definitely stressful. Prices are only going up and the salaries aren’t really catching up.”

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Finding a hidden gem with roommates comes down to who you know

Jenna Noel knew roommates were the only way she’d be able to swing living in Vancouver when she moved here in 2021. She’s come to realize access to housing is somewhat mediated by your social circle — because taking over someone else’s lease in a shared house was the only way to keep housing costs within her $1,000-or-less budget.

Her first Vancouver home was with three young men in Mount Pleasant, where her room was “more like a closet.” They’d constantly be approached by land assemblers, she remembers, since it was so close to the upcoming Broadway subway line.

“In a lot of places, the housing is bad, but in Vancouver, it seems like everybody is out for blood. It’s really intense,” Noel said.

She moved out of the home with the boys about a year ago, only to hear from her old roommates the place burned down in a fire.

Now she’s staying in another four-bedroom place. But the friend who held the lease is leaving, and the group had to arrange a new lease with the landlord — bumping their rent up from $2,200 to $2,600 every month.

“It could have been so much worse,” she said. “But there’s no control over it. And if we had wanted to move somewhere else, we would’ve been screwed.”

Noel would love to have her own space one day but knows she can’t afford to leave roommate living behind.

“I mean, my roommates are great. When it comes to roommates I think I got lucky. But at the end of the day, I would still love to live by myself,” she said. “It would be more than half my paycheque every month. And I’d be miserable.”

Her heart also goes out to newcomers she sees posting in housing groups online — where finding a space, even with roommates, for less than $1,000 is rare.

“You’d hope it would get to a breaking point where something has to be done about it. I like to think optimistically about a lot of things, but this isn’t one of them,” she said.

The average asking rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver climbed past $3,000 for the first time this summer, before falling slightly and hovering between $2,700 and $2,900 — as tracked by listing sites Zumper and Rentals.ca.

These price reports don’t cover all rentals on the market — they miss sublets and other suites only advertised on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist. But asking rents have certainly risen significantly post-pandemic, and many tenants are forced into the rental market by landlords who themselves are underwater and selling their units.

BC has rent control when a tenant stays on the same lease. In 2024, for example, the maximum rent increase for continuing tenancies is 3.5%. But when a tenant moves to a new unit, all bets are off. The rapid rise in asking rent prices has prompted some tenants who’ve been booted out with landlord-use eviction to call for between-tenancy rent controls.

For Noel, the staggering average rent increases are stressful — and she wants renters to have more security.

“If we’re going to allow people to continue to buy housing that they don’t live in and rent them out and be landlords, then there’s gotta be some stricter rules for landlords,” she said. “It’s pretty bleak.”

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