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“Renters of Vancouver” takes an intimate look at how the city's millennials are dealing with the housing crisis.

"I live in a 1911 heritage house that’s split into six condos. We live in a constant fear that we’ll be evicted, because our home is slated to be demolished.

My mom and I live together in our suite. We’ve been here for about five and a half years, and we’re model tenants. We always pay our rent on time, if not early. We’re non-smokers, we’re clean, quiet, and we look after the house. We really care about our home. A lot of people spend money on different things that interest them, like going on vacation, clothes, or dining out. I put all of my wages towards making this our unique space, because that’s the most important thing to me.

When we moved into this apartment, we had a great landlord. He did everything to keep the house up to code—if the fence was falling, for example, he would repair it. Then in March 2015 he sold the place to a developer. And pretty much right away the whole building got an eviction notice saying that the owner was tearing down the house. The letter told us it would happen between August and November of last year.

We put signs up saying ‘save this heritage home.’ It’s a beautiful old building, and on top of that the owner hadn’t gone through the legal steps for eviction. You have to have permits and papers in place before you start demolishing a house, or decide to make major renovations, which the developer didn’t have.

Because we pointed out that what he was doing was illegal, the owner tried different ways to evict us. He sent us a letter saying that his close family would be using all six suites, and that we’d all have to move out as a result. On top of all that, he put the house back on the market. He bought the place for $2.7 million last year, and right now it’s listed for $4.8 million.

Eventually, we took our case to the Residential Tenancy Branch. We had lots of documents and letters from him—he’d put all the reasons he’d come up with to throw us out in writing. Luckily, we won with the first attempt.

But there’s still some very shady stuff going on with our house. We send our rent cheques to a proxy who we know works for an immigration company. He’s not the owner—he just manages the building. We’ve tried contacting the proxy to find out some more information about the developers, but we’re told nothing. We’re simply asked to send our money.

It gets weirder too. I work as a video and audio editor. A few months ago, I’d been up all night finishing a project, so I slept in a little bit. At about 10am, I woke up and heard some men talking in Mandarin in the hallway. I looked through the peephole, and they were in the suite next door. Then I checked my front door, and it was unlocked, which was strange because we make a point of never doing that. And then I got a text from the girl upstairs saying ‘Holy crap—these guys have just tried to open my apartment.’ She asked them what was going on, and they held up all the keys to our suites. Then they proceeded to go to the top floor. The person that lives up there was away that day, and the men just walked right in. What I find really disturbing is the idea that these people were most likely wandering around my home while I was alone and sleeping. And we’d received absolutely no notice from the landlord.

Right now we’re just waiting for our eviction notice to finally come through legally. I do understand that someone has bought the property—a developer has invested a few million dollars into being able to own the place, so he has the right to do what he wants. But the way that we’ve been treated seems very unfair.

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that with my age and my prospects, I’ll probably have to move to another city to live and work. I used to contribute almost 300 hours of volunteer time into the community here, and I really care about it. I definitely do feel a bit pinched out. But most of all I worry for my mom. Her entire life is here. She’s had friends for over 40 years in this area. The thought of her having to move out of her community is pretty devastating to me."

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