Housing advocates on Saturday staged a rally in Burnaby to protest decisions made by Metro Vancouver city officials they say will push thousands of vulnerable renters out of their homes.

A number of protestors – many of them Burnaby residents – have been periodically rallying for months in opposition to development practices they believe unfairly target low-income residents.

Zoe Luba, a protest organizer and member of Alliance Against Displacement, said she and her allies would continue to march as long as Burnaby city council continues to ignore their demands.

“We’re saying develop the neighbourhood, but develop it into non-market midrise towers so everyone can stay and more low-income people can move in,” Luba said. “So the neighbourhood becomes a non-market working-class downtown.”

Nearly half of Burnaby renters pay more than 30 per cent of their income on rent, putting them in “unaffordable” rental situations, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Meanwhile, the vacancy rate of rental units in Burnaby sits at 0.6 per cent, which is below the Metro Vancouver average of 0.9 per cent.

Luba said the City of Burnaby has a budgetary surplus that she says needs to be invested in affordable apartments to house the people who are being displaced by her city’s race to develop luxury units.

In the meantime, she said, low-income residents are left stranded when their rental buildings are knocked down to be replaced with apartments too expensive for average renters to afford.

“But people are organizing.” Luba said. “People are fighting back.”

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