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Letter: We need to protect older affordable rental stock before it's too late

The Editor, Re. " Rentals also hit by market downturn " ( The Tri-City News , May 30).
Townline confirmed to The Tri-City News this week that it would be temporarily postponing the sales launch of its Meridian project, a 38-storey highrise development located a block from Burquitlam Station.

The Editor,

Re. "Rentals also hit by market downturn" (The Tri-City News, May 30).

The handwringing in this article over how a downturn in markets will jeopardize future completion of new affordable rental apartments in the pipeline seems disingenuous when one considers that a good many of these projects involve sites where existing older affordable rental complexes were first destroyed to enable their construction.

Douglas Todd, in his Vancouver Sun article headlined "Who’s going to be able to pay that?," puts the number at 767 older affordable rental suites destroyed in Coquitlam in the last three years alone — a whopping 20% of Coquitlam’s total rental housing stock.

Many of these suites had problems no worse than the ones elaborated in The Tri-City News' article "PoCo renters win their arbitration case" (May 30), and could and should have been preserved.

Apart from the questionable morality of displacing 767 low-income families into a rental market with near-zero availability, the yet to be completed bonus-density incentivized new “affordable” apartments could easily have been approved on other sites.

Even now, it would not be too late for the municipality to actually implement its own policy directive in its Housing Affordability Strategy, and protect its remaining 80% of older affordable rental stock, as has already been done in New Westminster simply by refusing further up-zoning of such properties.

In this context, to place exclusive responsibility on market forces is not just disingenuous, it is misleading.

It is time for Coquitlam city council to face up to its part in this continuing affordable rentals fiasco before yet more affordable homes and their occupants are sacrificed for its cozy romance with the development industry.

True concern for the amount of affordable rental stock begins with preserving the affordable housing we already have. Once council takes care of this, it will also be in a much stronger position to call on senior governments to do their part in creating more housing for ordinary people.

Felix Thijssen, Coquitlam