Pity Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan.

Some of the Lower Mainland’s most seasoned anti-poverty activists are gunning for the NDP stalwart and his council over the continuing demolition of walk-up apartments near Metrotown.

In Corrigan’s backyard, some of the firepower comes from the Burnaby chapter of ACORN, a national group that cut its teeth in Metro Vancouver battling payday lenders.

From the west, Ivan Drury and the Social Housing Alliance, an aggressive thorn in the side of developers active in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, are also on the march. Drury was the agitator thrown out by the Carnegie Centre after Vancity threatened to yank its funding over protest tactics used to target Pidgin restaurant.

Drury and others in the Alliance, which he says gets no funding from anyone, have Burnaby in their sights. They have joined the Metrotown Residents Association to demand a moratorium on the demolition of Burnaby’s affordable rental housing stock. The humble three-storey buildings in Maywood, as the Metrotown neighbourhood is known, are home to many of Burnaby’s low-income residents.

“New immigrants, refugees, some people on assistance and working families,” said Drury describing the tenants. “They are all pretty vulnerable. They don’t have many housing options.”

Built in the sixties, some of the buildings still offer rents as low as $850 a month for a one-bedroom suite.

The buildings are steadily being bulldozed, particularly along thoroughfares where council has rezoned to allow higher density.

So far, 12 buildings have been demolished for a loss of 275 units of affordable housing. They’ve been replaced by six buildings providing 2,000 housing units, says Burnaby councillor Colleen Jordan, who chairs the city’s planning and development committee.

The new units are a mix of condos and rentals. All are vastly more expensive to buy or rent and out of reach for the previous tenants.

Jordan admits the supply of affordable rental housing is shrinking and the waits for Burnaby’s subsidized housing are long.

So where are the displaced renters to go?

“I don’t have the answer,” Jordan says bluntly.

Rick McGowan of the residents association thinks he knows: He says many of those who can’t afford higher rents are dragging their children out of schools, leaving friends behind, and migrating to Surrey or New Westminster.

Faced with an onslaught of protests at a recent public hearing, council asked staff to examine the legality of a demolition moratorium.

But Jordan admits that, unlike Vancouver, Burnaby lacks the legal authority to stop demolitions. McGowan accuses council of simply buying time with the moratorium research.

Jordan acknowledges her city’s growing affordability problem. Under Metro’s regional growth plans, Burnaby has been told it will need more than 7,000 units of low-market to mid- range affordable housing by 2021, she said.

But in an all-too-common refrain from municipal politicians, both Jordan and Corrigan lay the resposibility to build it on higher levels of government.

This of course is a favourite political sport in Burnaby — convenient when your opponents are in power in Victoria and Ottawa.

For now, Burnaby remains a developer’s dream, as noted by the Goodman brothers, two Realtors and authors of the Goodman report, who earlier this year put Corrigan on their “What’s Hot” list for development.

“Unlike Vancouver, Burnaby provides an example of free-market forces allowing for the unrestricted demolition of rental apartment buildings, and ironically this in a NDP stronghold.”

At some point, being the darling of the real estate developers could become a political liability for Corrigan and his NDP councillors. They are already being rapped in planning and housing circles for dumping Burnaby’s poverty issues onto its neighbours.

Burnaby is no longer, if it ever was, a carefree middle-class suburb of Vancouver. It’s a big city with big city problems that should be dealt with in house. The activists converging to fight the Maywood demolitions will drive that point home.

They are also bound to shine a brighter light on the irony that the strongest NDP council in B.C. is doing little to avoid displacing the poor.