Opinion: Why I'm against Vancouver's proposed mass rezoning plan | Daily Hive

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Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Teresa Alfeld, who is a resident of the Fairview neighbourhood within Vancouver’s Broadway Plan area.

I’m a renter in the Fairview neighbourhood whose apartment building was recently rezoned, alongside the building next door.

The current buildings have a combined total of 30 units of spacious, affordable housing, but they will now be destroyed in order to build a market-rate tower as part of City of Vancouver’s Broadway Plan. That means 30 families, including my own, are losing our homes and being displaced.

This Tuesday, the Standardized Apartment Districts and City-Initiated Zoning Changes to Implement Broadway Plan and Cambie Corridor Plan goes to public hearing before Vancouver City Council approval. These policies will pre-zone huge swaths of the city, removing the requirement of public hearings for rezonings.

This is deeply troubling. Not only is it an affront to civic democracy, but it will directly harm tenants like me and my neighbours, who are already exhausted from bearing the brunt of the poorly conceived Broadway Plan’s mass redevelopment.

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A year ago, my neighbours and I received the Notice of Potential Redevelopment for our buildings. The time since has been awful. That first paper notice was accompanied by a hand-out from the City with information on homelessness services, underscoring just how dire the housing prospects are for displaced renters.

Over the next 12 months, my neighbours and I spent countless unpaid hours engaging with the developer, as mandated by the City’s Tenant Relocation and Protection Policy (TRPP). Each experience highlighted just how the process — ostensibly in place to protect us — was viewed by the developer as a minor inconvenience on the road to displacing us from our homes.

Some highlights included a first virtual “tenant meeting” with the developer, where we were immediately ordered to turn our microphones off, turn our cameras off, and type any questions in the chat box. Next, a follow up in-person “tenant meeting” with the developer with very little time for our questions. From there, several missed milestones, broken promises, and confusing emails from the developer, who has signed emails using varying company names, including most recently “Big Brother Properties” (Was this a joke? A threat?).

The TRPP is supposed to protect tenants, but time and time again, the developer ignored their obligations to us, refused to answer our questions, and treated tenants with hostility, contempt, and a total lack of respect. And City staff involved had no power to fully enforce the TRPP.

But we knew we had one opportunity to fight back: speak out at our public hearing. We tenants got organized, and we worked together to document our experiences with the developer.

After months of work, we shared our stories at the public hearing in front of City Council. And our city councillors listened to us. They passed a historic amendment to our building’s approved rezoning, requiring the City to engage with tenants directly. City staff now have to confirm with us that the developer is meeting their requirements under TRPP, before the developer can advance to a building permit application.

The developer’s word alone is no longer enough.

While our buildings were still rezoned, we now have another mechanism to hold the developer to public account before demolition occurs.

My experience with the power of public hearings is why I’m extremely concerned about the proposed Standardized Apartment Districts and City-Initiated Zoning Changes to Implement Broadway Plan and Cambie Corridor Plan.

I’m not anti-density, or anti-build. I understand that Vancouver has an affordability crisis and that action is required. As a longtime resident, I want to ensure we are creating genuinely affordable, liveable housing so Vancouver can grow towards becoming the vibrant, diverse, and inclusive city we all want it to be. But this shouldn’t come at the cost of destroying existing affordable housing, thereby placing the burden of solving the housing crisis on those most vulnerable: tenants.

The proposed policies remove a key mechanism for tenant protection: public hearings for the rezoning process for thousands of residents in tenanted buildings. If these policies are approved, developers could be given carte blanche to skirt tenant protections without accountability, as they no longer need City Council’s approval to rezone properties. If my experience taught me anything, it’s that public hearings for rezoning applications are vital to ensure that at-risk tenants’ voices are heard.

What I desperately want to protect is the democratic process wherein those directly affected by a proposed redevelopment can contribute to City Council’s decision on what gets built. In public hearings, city councillors have an obligation to listen, and to ask direct questions to the developer, especially about how they’ve met their obligations to tenants under the TRPP.

Bear in mind that next year, the City will be reviewing the TRPP, providing an opportunity to strengthen the policy and ensure it’s actually enforceable. Mass rezonings enacted before the full review of the TRPP simply don’t make sense, and risk harm to tenants by encouraging developers to act with impunity.

And it’s not just about tenants’ voices. We need public hearings as they are a key opportunity to ensure the developer’s proposals are in line with our City’s needs, values, and priorities. During our public hearing, city councillors seemed alarmed when a tenant pointed out that the proposed 155-unit tower’s mandated 20 per cent below-market units equaled exactly 30 units: the same number we already had in our old buildings. The tower was adding net zero affordable housing to our community.

The proposed pre-zoning policies go to a public hearing for City Council approval on Tuesday, September 16, 2025 at 6 p.m. I’ll be speaking against it, and I hope you’ll join me and speak up for tenants and for an affordable and inclusive city as well.

You can sign up to speak in person or by phone here. Even just a short phone call can make a difference.

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