Earlier this year, B.C. Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon admitted that vacancy control protects vulnerable renters from British Columbia’s exploitive rental market.
It was a low-key about-face from an NDP government that has repeatedly disappointed over 100,000 B.C. households at risk of homelessness by insisting that vacancy control measures are not in its housing policy tool box.
Furthermore, without vacancy control, landlords are incentivized to make bad-faith evictions in the pursuit of higher rent, according to Kahlon himself, just this year.
Nevertheless, the NDP government repeatedly rebuffed vacancy control because it was excluded from the recommendations of a Rental Housing Task Force report produced six years ago. Meanwhile, the average rent for a newly listed one-bedroom unit in Vancouver increased $706 per month, or about 37 per cent, from 2019 to 2024.
If we had vacancy control, we could swing almost every other policy way closer to what the landlords want. There’d be almost no incentive for bad faith evictions, and at the same time the financial impact of having to find a new place to rent would be minimized (if not initially, over time).
Right now we’re so far the opposite way, we have to have all these protections in place. Of course landlords would love to toss their long term tenants to get double or triple rent each month, and at the same time it’s financially ruinous for a tenant to have to suddenly find themselves an extra $1-2000/mo to afford even the cheapest rental on the market.