Having decided they’ve seen too many older apartments demolished to make way for condos, housing activists in the Metrotown area have been occupying buildings slated for the wrecking ball.
With vacancy rates at less than 1% and rents skyrocketing, there’s just nowhere for these folks to go. They’re the people who cut hair, serve food and work in IT — virtually anyone who can’t afford a $500,000 condo.
Largely forgotten in this crisis is that almost all of the old apartments we now consider affordable were built in the 1960s and ’70s with the aid of federal construction subsidies and tax incentives. With those programs cancelled in the 1980s, our lack of rental housing has reached a crisis point.
Thus, every time a walk-up gets knocked down, it isn’t just the homes of longtime residents that are being lost. It’s also the vanishing of an investment Canadians made to ensure our communities had room for people who aren’t wealthy.
The federal government has pledged to develop a national housing strategy and we urge it to move expeditiously because the people in these old walk-ups are quickly running out of time.
– North Shore News
