Every day, I walk or take transit to work. And every day, renters approach me with heartbreaking stories of how close they are to being pushed out of Vancouver. Renters who line up at open house after open house but are never lucky enough to land the apartment. Renters who work two jobs to support their families but still can’t find a home they can afford. Renters who grew up in Vancouver but now find themselves spending more time commuting to work from the suburbs and less time with their loved ones.

So, I worry when people question the need for market-rental buildings in our city. Some say market rents geared to anyone above the median household income are “luxury” and should be rejected outright. But this argument is short-sighted and fails to reflect the interconnected nature of our housing market.

Right now, with a shortage of rental housing, multiple renters bid on the same few available units. Some may have professional incomes while others may be scraping by through working two minimum-wage jobs. Guess who has a better chance of landing that unit? When we don’t build enough market-rental housing, it’s the most vulnerable who lose out and get pushed out of our city — or worse, onto our streets.

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The rental crisis has grown so critical we’re not even building enough housing for medium-income workers. Take, for example, the average elementary school teacher, who makes around $60,000 a year, and the average police officer, who makes around $80,000, for a total $140,000 household income. Paying 33 per cent or less of your income on housing is widely considered to be affordable. So this hypothetical family can reasonably spend around $3,800 a month on a home for themselves and their two children.

Purpose-built rental developments are springing up all around the Davie and Denman neighbourhood in Vancouver's west end. (StarMetro)

Home ownership used to be the default for a family like this. But thanks to runaway housing costs and a ban on apartments in 60 per cent of our city, the cheapest way to buy in most of Vancouver is often a duplex. On the eastside, duplexes currently sell for about $1.5 million, requiring an annual household income of around $335,000, not to mention having $300,000 in cash for a down payment. Not exactly in reach for our hypothetical family.

The second option for them is to try and find a rental, but thanks to decades of underinvestment in rental housing, secure options are few and far between. They tend to be basement suites or investor condos renting out at market rates. In other words, unsecured units where renters could be evicted for any number of perfectly legal reasons.

These aren’t hypothetical scenarios — people tell me these stories all the time. Recently at city council, a young man told us about his 300-square-foot attic rental in an old house. He lives there with his partner. They’re both community-minded people who work hard to make our city better. They get paid reasonably well, certainly enough that any fair-minded person would expect them to be able to live securely. But they can’t.

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They are two medium-income earners who have no other option than to occupy a unit that could be housing someone else of more modest means. They would jump at the opportunity to move into a new market rental development. So would nurses, teachers and construction or tech workers.

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When we reject housing, we’re rejecting the only available housing option for over half our population. We’re rejecting firefighters and police officers — 85 per cent of whom now live outside of Vancouver. We’re rejecting metal workers, librarians, accountants, pharmacists and engineers. We’re rejecting our neighbours.

But when we say yes to market rental housing, something important happens. People move into new purpose-built rentals, pressure eases on the older stock they move out of, and it gets a little easier for lower-income renters to remain in the neighbourhoods they know and love. This is how we reverse the trend of people being pushed out of Vancouver.

In our current economic climate, purpose-built market rentals are not luxury housing. Single-family homes are luxury housing. When we replace multimillion-dollar houses with market rentals, we provide the kind of homes our workforce desperately needs but cannot find.

The choice is simple. Either we reject rental projects and send a message that only multimillion-dollar homes belong in Vancouver. Or we support housing at all levels and send a message that we will fight to make sure working families belong in our city.

Read more:

It’s easy to advocate for affordable rentals, so how does Kennedy Stewart intend to make it a reality?

Minimum-wage earners in Metro Vancouver cannot afford rent in any of the city’s 70 neighbourhoods, report finds

What some Vancouver landlords are offering to prospective tenants as real-estate market falters