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Burnaby is among the worst—or the best—on rental housing, depending on who you ask
Dustin Godfrey
July 12, 2022
The City of Burnaby is either one of the best two cities in Metro Vancouver on the rental housing file or among the worst, depending on who you ask.
Last month, the BC Rental Project, which has spent thousands of dollars to promote its positions in Facebook ads, rated the city at a C- for its work on rental housing. It was the same grade given to Vancouver, Surrey, and West Vancouver, and it trailed behind seven other municipalities.
Just four municipalities—White Rock, Port Coquitlam, Maple Ridge, and Richmond—fared worse on the group’s report card.
But BC General Employees’ Union treasurer Paul Finch, who has advocated for years on housing in Burnaby, said the analysis lacks nuance and prioritizes rental housing supply over affordability.
The good, the bad, and the ugly
The report card’s analysis is broken down into three parts: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The report praises “some large rental projects” being approved in the city, “which will mean more new rentals on the market.”
It also noted the tenant assistance policy, which provides new housing for renters displaced by demovictions, and the policy requiring replacement of all rentals demolished for new projects.
But it also included, under the “bad” heading, a seemingly backhanded compliment for the city’s efforts on below-market rental housing.
“Despite delivering on below-market rental housing, thanks to generous additional density permitted for projects, the city lacks policies to incentivize the delivery of market rental,” the report notes.
“This continues to contribute to a lack of rental availability and higher demand and uptake of below-market units by tenants who may otherwise be able to afford market rental.”
Also under the “bad” heading is a reported shortfall of 4,914 rental homes between 2017 and 2021. (The report refers to this period as being “under this mayor and council,” however the current mayor and council were not elected until near the end of 2018.)
It also refers to a “net loss in market rentals”—a total of 985 between 2017 and 2021, though it acknowledges that some were replaced by below-market housing.
“If the city does not take steps to incentivize much more market rental, housing affordability in Burnaby will continue to deteriorate,” the report says.
“This government needs to focus more on incentivizing new rental homes, instead of layering on more complicated policies which make it difficult to deliver rental homes.”
By comparison, West Vancouver, which similarly received a C- grade from the group, was found by the BC Rental Project to have done nothing good.
Under the “bad” heading is a brief note that West Vancouver lost four rental homes between 2017 and 2021, and the “ugly” heading included just a brief note that the municipality had the lowest population growth between 2017 and 2021 “due to its restrictive growth policies.”
Delta, meanwhile, was given a B- with similarly brief notes. Under “good,” the report notes the development of a housing action plan—something Burnaby also has done in the last year—with a net gain of just two new rental homes between 2017 and 2021.
‘Proceeding on a false premise’
Finch said the BC Rental Project analysis implicitly claims that inclusionary zoning—such as the city’s rental-use zoning policy, which requires a certain amount of rental housing in every development—“hurt the provisioning of rentals, and that’s just not true.”
“The report’s proceeding on a false premise that all new rentals are equal, and it’s not true. The crisis we’re having right now is an affordability crisis. You can ask any working person in BC about affordability, and they’ll give you a very similar response,” Finch said.
In fact, Finch said Burnaby is, in his opinion, one of the top two cities in Metro Vancouver on the rental housing file, alongside Port Coquitlam. (BCGEU executive vice-president Kari Michaels was a participant in the Burnaby mayor’s task force on community housing, which shaped the city’s rental regulations.)
“Inclusionary zoning policies, if implemented correctly, like I believe they’ve been implemented in Burnaby and Port Coquitlam, are among the best policies to incentivize [affordable rentals],” Finch said.
He added that focusing on the loss of market rentals in the city fails to paint the full picture, as market rentals are “so far above what many people can afford.”
“Housing exists on a spectrum—wholly owned to highly mortgaged to rental to affordable rental. And a lot of people want to move into the ownership market,” he said.
To do that, they need to be able to save money, Finch noted.
Finch said he didn’t want to give the city a letter grade as did the BC Rental Project, saying he doesn’t “agree with its methodology.”
But he did note some ways housing affordability could improve in the region.
“We need to see common standards for inclusionary zoning across all the municipalities so that there’s common rules that are forecast in advance so that landowners and developers know what their overhead costs are going to be in advance,” Finch said.
“One of the things hurting that is when you have some municipalities that are not requiring affordability and others that are because the ones that don’t require affordability are, in effect, undercutting the municipalities that do require affordability.”
Thousands of dollars on ads
It’s not entirely clear who’s behind the BC Rental Project, which has close to 13,000 likes on Facebook and which manages to reach hundreds of thousands of impressions through paid advertising on the social media platform.
The group’s website, which launched in 2019, has no contact page—only a link to its Facebook page—and the name of the registrant of the website under Whois protocol is redacted.
Adrian Crook—a co-founder of Abundant Housing Vancouver who is no longer affiliated with that group and a former council candidate in Vancouver—is prominent in the group’s media presence, including appearing in many videos on Facebook.
He also appeared as a spokesperson for the group during the 2020 BC election.
Crook told local municipal affairs podcast Cambie Report in 2020 that the people involved in the BC Rental Project were “rental housing providers, renters, advocates,” but declined to comment further.
Burnaby Beacon reached out to the group through its Facebook page but has yet to hear back.
The BC Rental Project largely targets the City of Vancouver’s mayor and council and the BC NDP government in its posts, with thousands of dollars of Facebook ads currently active.
That includes $900-$999 the group spent to get over 150,000 impressions on a June 3 posting of the municipal report card. A further $8,800-$10,900 has been spent on other currently active ads on the social media site, according to the BC Rental Project page’s transparency report from Meta, the company that owns Facebook.
In all, the ads are racking up over 835,000 impressions on Facebook—and those are just the currently active ads.
Cambie Report found in 2020 that the BC Rental Project page had spent close to $38,000 on Facebook ads in the 14 months prior to the provincial election call, compared to $32,000 in spending from the BC Federation of Labour, $20,000 from PressProgress, and $9,000 from the BC General Employees’ Union.