Mayor makes last-minute proposal for renter protections in Vancouver's 30-year plan

The long-awaited Vancouver Plan is set to go before council on Wednesday after almost four years of work – and Mayor Kennedy Stewart is adding a last-minute amendment.

On Tuesday, Stewart held a news conference to announce he wants to include renter protections in the plan, the same that were built into the Broadway Plan.

“Housing is one of the most personal things in our lives, the places we live are usually the places we keep most of our valuable possessions,” Stewart said at the beginning of the news conference. “Today I’m announcing my plan to extend these renter protections city-wide through the Vancouver Plan.”

Stewart’s plan would focus on renters displaced by redevelopment. Tenants would have the first right of refusal to return to the newly developed property at the same, or lower rent, and builders would also front relocation costs – an idea, the mayor admitted, that made some builders nervous.

“I did meet with builders yesterday and we brought up what happened in the Broadway Plan, you could see there’s a lot of chewing on the bottom of the lip,” he said, adding the protections will make building costs more expensive and could force towers to go higher.

“(The builders) show us their proformas and say, ‘We’ll need this much more density if we’re going to make this happen,’ and that’s something we’ll have to consider,” Stewart said.

At least three councilors CTV News reached out to said they were unaware the mayor was making the announcement Tuesday.

The concept of looking forward to Vancouver 2050 was first passed by council back in November 2018, just after Kennedy Stewart had been elected as mayor. Since then it’s gone through several stages of planning and public feedback, some of which was slowed by the pandemic.

Last week, staff released new concept sketches to show what the proposed areas of the city would look like.

Karis Hiebert is manager of the Vancouver Plan project, and said staff hadn’t looked at details such as renter protections yet.

“The Vancouver Plan is a higher level plan so we haven’t gotten into the specifics, but we can definitely look into (that) for the implementation phase,” Hiebert said, adding that even if the plan is passed by council it won’t be implemented for some time.

“The scope of work that we have in the report estimates that we have between two, two-and-a-half years before we would have a land use development plan,” she said.

The plan goes before council on Wednesday and as of 6 p.m. Tuesday, 53 speakers were signed up.