A cul-de-sac with multi-million dollar houses – some apparently empty – sits undisturbed and safe from development near Metrotown in Burnaby even as RCMP forcibly evicted protesters from a rental building facing demolition.

Houses on Barbell Place are assessed at around $1.8 million. The street is immediately adjacent to Royal Oak Skytrain Station, but the properties are not up for redevelopment in the name of putting density near transit.

"It's a great neighbourhood – Burnaby's best kept secret," said one resident along Barbell Place who didn't want to give his name.

It's a stark contrast that illustrates a divided Burnaby, where attempts to channel voracious appetite for development near its town centres and transit lines has left winners and losers.

Losers include those evicted from some 300 units in low-rise, rental buildings as they are turned into high-rise condos. The three-storey building at Imperial Street and Dunblane Avenue is slated to become a 26 storey building.

Seven protesters were arrested there Wednesday after a 12-day squat, as the RCMP enforced a court injunction to allow the developer Amacon to continue its work.

Many of those tenants' rents were controlled in the range of $500 to $700 a month for a one-bedroom, a rent that can't be found anywhere nearby, said one woman who spoke at a press conference held by protesters Wednesday.

"Your Metrotown plan doesn't include them. Where will you put them? You put them on the street?" said a woman who gave her name as Sherry and said she lived in a nearby rental unit.

The buildings along Imperial Street are in the zone demarcated for development because it's in the Metrotown Regional Town Centre, which is bounded by Imperial Street to the south, Royal Oak Avenue to the East, Boundary Road to the West, and extends as far as Bond Street to the North.

Those boundaries were drawn because the town centre is a hub of business and residential use and is close to transit, said Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan.

"We're focusing higher density around transit stations," Corrigan said. He said the planning for the towers had been completed in 1989.

Burnaby city council's rezoning of that stretch along Imperial Street from RM3 – with a 12 metre maximum height – to Comprehensive Development started in November 2015 and concluded in April 2016, city documents show.

Barbell Place, south of Imperial Street, is considered outside Metrotown Regional Town Centre, even though it has ready access to Royal Oak Skytrain Station.

No one answered the doors at several houses in the neighbourhood; one house had newspapers piling up on its front steps, and one neighbour said he had seen no one there in a long time.

The only duplex in Barbell Place appears to be two five-bedroom houses connected by a small joining structure. Each half duplex in that building is assessed at $1.08 million. The property as a whole is wider than any of the buildings that are being demolished north of Imperial Avenue.

Ivan Drury, one of the protesters arrested at the squat, said he believes the city listens to homeowners – and not to renters.

"There's asymmetrical citizenship," said Drury. "If you own your own detached home, the message from council is that they belong and they won't be disturbed, in a system that values property ownership above all other freedoms. And renters who don't own property are treated as disposable and are actually being systematically replaced."

UBC Geographer Craig E. Jones, who has been studying the fate of low-rise buildings of this vintage, said almost all of the ones in Burnaby fall into areas deemed by the city as places to densify.

"For whatever reason, the homeowners tend to have more sway with Burnaby city hall than renters," he said.

And hundreds more units could also disappear if the city of Burnaby decides to allow that as part of its updated Metrotown plan, he said.

"Should the plan update show some more rezonings we could see all of those places redeveloped," Jones said.

The City of Vancouver protects low-rise rental buildings, he said, though many are not under the same development pressures as those near Metrotown, Jones said.

Burnaby's mayor defended his city's decision – blaming the hardship faced by the evicted renters on failures at the provincial and federal levels to fund affordable housing. He said reversing the city's decision to rezone the low-rise rentals would be unfair to the developer.

As for why his council's development plans had left out the possibility of allowing development in low-density, private single family homes, the mayor said, "It's our community's wish to see single family homes protected."