Letterbox: Tenant protections follow years of approving unaffordable towers and enriching developers

In this letter-to-the-editor, Dan Olson responds to Coquitlam’s recent discussions regarding the city’s displaced tenant protection policy.

Dear editor,

Talk about closing the barn door after the horse’s gone.

We’re well into decade plus of city councils – Coquitlam and Burnaby being the biggest culprits – having weighed the easiest option to creating housing for a growing population and made it a strategy to displace whole communities of the least affluent and most at-risk citizens.

With the SkyTrain as their rationale, Coquitlam council provided the levers for developers to turn affordable tracts of apartments into unaffordable towers, enriching both the developers and speculators.

While a more noble and much harder means of meeting the pressing needs of growth would have been rezoning nearby neighborhoods where single-family lots predominate, they essentially created a different kind of crash for seniors on fixed income, younger adults just beginning careers or post secondary, and other marginalized groups.

Yes, there were some pockets where single family homeowners sold at a nice (and appropriate) profit to make way for development, more times than not the councils took the easy money, blamed the federal government and washed their hands of it.

For the residents of the few older apartments still standing, this sudden show of concern by council is welcome, but shouldn’t absolve the city of its guilt for doing next to nothing when it could have made a difference.

Dan Olson
Coquitlam

Editor’s note: Since 2015, Coquitlam’s tenant relocation policy has been used for residents of 1,285 homes.

There are currently about 3,700 units of purpose-built rental housing, in Coquitlam. Approximately 61 percent of those units are at least 45 years old.