Vancouver city councillor wants renters to get first bid on their buildings | Daily Hive

Vancouver city councillor proposes giving renters the first chance to buy their buildings

Sean Orr. (COPE)

Vancouver city councillor Sean Orr of the COPE party is calling for new measures to stop renters from being priced out of their neighbourhoods, including giving tenants a legal chance to buy their own buildings before investors can swoop in.

The proposed bundle of strategies aim to help the city preserve rental homes and convert more of them into co-operative housing or publicly owned housing.

Orr argues that the current housing market is failing most residents. In the motion, he states that rents are “rising faster than wages, pushing residents out of the city,” and that affordable rental buildings are being sold off and redeveloped — effectively “displacing long-term tenants and driving average rents up.”

You might also like:

The motion asserts that publicly owned or co-operative housing “offers long-term stability and affordability for tenants.” But renters today have few tools to protect their homes when landlords decide to sell. Orr writes that renters “lack powers to formally collectively bargain, and face practical barriers and no institutional support to purchase the buildings in communities they love and call home.”

Similar programs already exist elsewhere. The motion notes that Montreal and Washington, D.C. have “Right of First Refusal and Tenant Opportunity to Purchase policies” that allow tenants or non-profit housing operators to buy buildings when they go up for sale. These policies “strengthen communities and prevent displacement.”

The proposed strategy would use new legal, regulatory, and financial tools to prevent rental housing from being lost to speculative investment.

If his motion is approved, City Council would instruct City staff to come back with a set of recommendations designed to protect affordable housing and empower renters.

These recommendations include establishing a tenant’s right of first refusal, which would give renters the opportunity to purchase their buildings and convert them into co-operatives. City staff would also explore stronger protections for land already used for social or non-profit housing, along with City-backed financial tools such as low-interest loans, land leases, land trusts, and other supports to help tenants and non-profit housing operators secure properties.

In addition, the strategy would look at creating zoning mechanisms that reserve certain areas exclusively for long-term, non-market housing, and expanding partnerships with non-profit entities, First Nations, and other public bodies to keep land dedicated to affordable homes and community benefits.

Orr suggests the City should craft a “Public Land Strategy to strengthen the City’s ability to secure and retain land for public benefit” and “use regulatory, financial, and legal tools to prevent the loss of social, cultural, and public-serving land vulnerable to speculative redevelopment.”

One of the most notable parts of the motion: renters could eventually become co-owners of their buildings. The motion calls for programs “to aid and support tenants in the co-purchase and ownership of existing housing as co-operatives,” helping “enhance tenant rights” and “protect affordable housing stock from redevelopment.”

You might also like: