VANCOUVER—It’s 10 minutes to 9 a.m. on a chilly February morning, and Stephanie Diamond is waiting in a drab gray hallway in a Burnaby office building.

Diamond has come to the Residential Tenancy Branch early, hoping to be first in line to submit documents appealing an eviction notice from her landlord. The 79-year-old is in pain from hip and knee problems and clutches a walking cane in each hand. But she assures her volunteer advocate, John Rethmetakis, that she’s fine: “Standing is better than sitting.”

Diamond has been dreading this eviction notice for months, ever since her apartment building in Coquitlam changed hands and the new owners started offering a few thousand dollars to tenants to move out. It’s a common occurrence in Metro Vancouver, where sky-high home prices and rising rents have made a compelling business case for evicting long-time tenants who are often paying much less than current market rent.

Diamond, her son Dwayne and one other tenant are the only people left in the 22-unit building. Diamond is living on a fixed income and currently pays $875 for her two-bedroom apartment. Until early December, she was working as a food demonstrator at Costco to make ends meet, but had to quit when the pain from her hips and knees got too bad.

“We didn’t take the (move-out) offer because rents are too high,” Diamond said. “I’m not sure where I’ll go – Hope probably.”

Diamond’s building is one of 10 buildings owned by holding companies that share the same directors with Coltric Properties. The company did not respond to an interview request for this story.

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Coltric Properties has followed a strategy of buying older apartment buildings throughout Metro Vancouver, offering tenants money to move out, and then attempting to evict any remaining tenants in order to renovate and charge much higher rents.

The Star has spoken to several of those tenants; many of them, like Diamond, are elderly, on fixed incomes, and can’t afford current rents. Some said the stress brought on by the threat of eviction was causing them to lose sleep and making existing health conditions worse.

Jim McIntyre, general manager of planning and development for the City of Coquitlam, says he’s aware of Diamond’s predicament, and city staff have been talking with the landlord about the renovation. The landlord has told the city tenants need to leave because the work will involve removing asbestos, McIntyre said.

“It is troubling and we’re trying to approach it and deal with it as best we can, but getting into that area where it’s more probably in the province’s bailiwick than ours,” McIntyre said. But, he said, “This is part of our communication back to the landlord: ‘For goodness sakes, could you not maybe help these particular tenants a little bit more in terms of relocating them?’”

Diamond is frustrated with the response from both her own municipal government and her MLA, Selina Robinson, minister of municipal affairs and housing; a provincial task force recently recommended tougher action to prevent renovictions, but government has yet to adopt those suggestions.

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So on Feb. 4, Diamond plans to travel to New Westminster to support a city that is trying to take immediate action to stop renovictions: New Westminster staff have proposed a new bylaw that would see the city fine landlords or refuse business licenses to owners who renovict tenants.

In New Westminster, renovictions have been growing rapidly: over the past two years, city staff have tracked at least 315 apartments that have been renovicted. City workers often get several calls a week from “people in really desperate situations,” said Emilie Adin, the city’s director of development services.

“I think renovictions have probably been the most challenging issue we’ve faced over the past number of years,” said Jonathan Cote, the Mayor of New Westminster. “We’ve felt very limited to help support the renters in this situation.”

At council’s direction, city staff has been working on the problem since 2015, but councillor Patrick Johnstone said it was becoming clear that asking the province for more renter protections and making resolutions at the annual Union of B.C. Municipalities convention wasn’t enough.

Denying building permits to landlords who renovict isn’t an option, Adin said: under current provincial law, cities can be sued if they deny or delay building permits.

But other Metro Vancouver municipalities have used business license bylaws to prohibit the sale of cats and dogs in pet stores, a practice that has been linked to animal abuse, said Adin. Staff began thinking about whether they could “stretch” the business licensing power of the city to cover how landlords operate. After consulting with the city’s lawyers, staff realized it could be a solution.

Adin emphasized that taking away a business license would likely be used as a last resort, and after a building had already been emptied. Cote characterized the proposal as a “carrot and stick” approach, because the city also wants to introduce tax incentives for landlords who keep their buildings well-maintained without displacing tenants. The public will be able to give feedback on the proposal on Feb. 4.

In Vancouver, council passed a motion in December asking staff to report back with ways to prevent renoviction. Dan Garrison, a housing planner, said Vancouver staffers have been in contact with New Westminster about renoviction enforcement measures.

McIntyre said Coquitlam doesn’t have a big problem with renovictions, but he said he was also watching the New Westminster proposal with interest.

Hobbling from her apartment building in Coquitlam to the RTB office in Burnaby to the downtown Vancouver office of her landlord, Diamond is running out of patience with the politicians she says have been too slow to act.

“It’s not just us, there’s also other people in a similar situation,” she said. “If you don’t speak up, it’s hidden over and that’s it – nobody knows about it and it’s all forgotten.”

Correction — February 4, 2019: This article was edited from a previous version that misspelled Emilie Adin’s surname.

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