The Broadway Plan and tenant protections through the eyes of a new Vancouverite

Good morning, 

Nate with you today. We recently surpassed 28,000 subscribers to the newsletter and I want to take a moment to thank all of you, our readers and supporters, for your continued encouragement and engagement with what we’re doing here at the Lookout. 

It always brightens my day to hear from you all, and I feel really honoured when people want to share their stories, their struggles, and their triumphs with us. Today’s story came about because of a conversation that started when a reader reached out to us early this year. 

Because we’re a tiny publication with limited resources, we tend to cover more hyper-local profiles and slice-of-life type stories than the sprawling investigative or analytical coverage you get from bigger outlets (maybe one day we’ll get there!). With today’s story, we’re trying to take the middle road, sharing a personal perspective and some niche data and information on the city’s biggest issue (housing and development, of course). 

Let us know what you think. As always, we’ll be happy to hear from you. Let’s get to it!

— Nate Lewis, Vancity Lookout 

PS - If you find this newsletter valuable, please consider forwarding it to your friends. New to the Lookout? Sign-up for free.

WEATHER

Friday: 7 🌡️ 2 | 🌧️

Saturday: 7 🌡️ 3 | 🌧️

Sunday: 7 🌡️ 4 | 🌧️

Monday: 11 🌡️ 6 | 🌧️

NUMBERS OF THE DAY

🧑🏼‍🚒 15: The number of people taken to hospital after a fire in a Burnaby apartment building. Firefighters are reminding people to keep fire doors in their buildings closed, as an open door caused extensive damage in this case. [CBC]

📉 200: The number of Langara College faculty that have lost work due to the federal caps on international students, who accounted for about 40 per cent of Langara’s student body from 2022-2024. [CTV]

🪧 1,411: The number of days a labour dispute lasted between staff and ownership at a Vancouver hotel. A strike began in 2021 after nearly 150 employees were fired during the pandemic. The new collective agreement gives those former staff the right to return to the job. [Urbanized] 

💸 1: The number of years since Metro Vancouver announced a $3+ billion overrun for a regional wastewater plant. Critics are still calling for an independent public inquiry into what went wrong. [CityNews]

HOUSING

The Broadway Plan and tenant protections through the eyes of a new Vancouverite

What happened: Nathaniel Gumapac works as a nurse at Vancouver General Hospital. Originally from Ontario, the 24-year-old moved to Vancouver with his girlfriend and two cats in August 2024. 

 A generous offer: Gumapac and his partner decided to rent in Mount Pleasant, and after some searching, they were offered a one-bedroom unit in an older building near Emily Carr University at around market rates.

“[The landlord] called me the next day and they're like, good news and bad news,” Gumapac recalled. 

The bad news was the unit was supposed to renovated – as it was a long-time tenant that moved out – but that wouldn’t be happening anymore. The good news is they were offering a $600 rent decrease. 

• “So same building, same place, same size, just like, they didn't rip out all the carpet and replace it with vinyl planks… this felt like a very generous offer,” which he jumped on immediately, Gumapac said. 

Plot twist: But there was a bit more bad news to the situation. In March 2024 – six months before Gumapac and his partner moved in – Colliers International, on behalf of the building owner, applied to rezone the site to permit a 22-storey rental building.  

In the unit listing there was “a little boilerplate line at the bottom [saying] this area may subject to the Broadway Plan,” Gumapac said, but as a newcomer to Vancouver he didn’t know what that meant. 

As a self-described nosy person, and someone with a research background, Gumapac started looking into the plan and quickly found his building’s rezoning application. But he had a more challenging time figuring out what protections he might be entitled to if the building was redeveloped. 

Gumapac found the actual information to be quite inaccessible, describing how you need to navigate through multiple pages and different links on the city’s website to a 28-page “white sheet document full of legalese” where you could actually assess whether you’re eligible for tenancy protections. 

• In January 2023, Councillor Lenny Zhou and his ABC colleagues voted to disband the city’s Renter Office, which helped renters navigate city processes and inform them of their tenancy rights. Zhou’s amendment was added to a staff report that recommended the office continue its work. 

The details: For those who are eligible, the Tenant Relocation and Protection Policy (TRPP) offers a suite of compensations – beyond what’s offered city-wide – for tenants displaced by development in the Broadway Plan area, around transit hubs, in some parts of Grandview-Woodland.

Those include the right of first refusal to return to an equivalent unit in the new building at their previous rent, temporary rent top-up payments for interim housing, moving costs, assistance finding new housing, and additional support for low-income tenants.  

However, Gumapac found out that the policy only covers tenants who have lived in their homes for a year or more before a rezoning application was filed. The main rationale for the one-year requirement is to encourage building owners to continue to rent units when they have vacancies before and during the rezoning process, according to a city spokesperson. 

• Looking to Burnaby for a regional comparison, their renter protections are more lenient, as they apply to any tenancies established before a rezoning application is submitted. 

Zooming out: Nine per cent of tenancies being rezoned under the Broadway Plan are not eligible for the TRPP, according to the city’s data up to the end of 2024. The TRPP’s eligibility criteria is designed to apply to a high percentage of tenants but the city doesn’t have a specific benchmark for what portion of displaced tenants should be eligible, according to a city spokesperson.

• The city will continue publishing eligibility data every quarter, so we’ll see how those eligibility figures change as more sites progress through rezoning.   

Based on publicly available data, that ineligible figure jumps up to 16 per cent among eight buildings, including Gumapac’s, approved for rezoning in 2025. For Gumapac’s building specifically, nine out of 53 (17 per cent) units in the building aren’t covered under the policy.

“When you're on the outside, when you're part of the nine out of 53, you're shit out of luck,” Gumapac said, adding the province’s tenancy laws for redevelopment mean he’ll get four months notice and one month of free rent before being evicted.

As a temporary beneficiary of below-market housing, Gumapac said he wants other people to also have fair rent, “but it's hard to put my money where my mouth is, [when] I am the one who has to take the hit for that and lose my housing in order to increase the amount of housing stock in the Vancouver market,” he said.

• “We've fallen in love with Vancouver. We want to settle down here,” Gumapac said, adding he’s even trying to get his parents to move here.

Unintentional oversight: Green Party Councillor Pete Fry has been questioning whether the current process of tenant protections could be improved. 

“Oftentimes [council] will approve a rezoning, but they don't go to development permit for years. Like I can think of some [rezonings] that we've approved that still haven't broken ground since I've been on council over six years, “ Fry told Vancity Lookout. 

• Because TRPP eligibility to measured based on when a rezoning or development application is filed, Fry worries there’s an unintentional oversight in the policy. 

“Are we setting up a whole tranche of future tenants who are going to come in [to a building] and have five or more years under their belt at a location, and then suddenly, because it was rezoned and [the owner] just didn't do anything with it, [these tenants] may find themselves in a position where they don't have any relocation rights,” Fry questioned. 

“I want more housing, but I don't want to be negatively impacted by the development of more housing,” Gumapac said, summing up a basic, wicked contradiction of development, which the Broadway Plan’s tenant protections are intended to ease.  

The public hearing: At the public hearing for the rezoning of Gumapac’s building – which was unanimously approved – Fry brought up previous conversations in council that staff consider amending the TRPP to have it trigger on a development application rather than a rezoning. 

There have been some conversations about that, a housing regulation staff member told Fry, but they didn’t provide any sort of timeline. The TRPP was updated at the end of February 2025 but the possible change Fry mentioned wasn’t included in that. 

• An amendment from former Green Councillor Adriane Carr in January 2024 sought to solve the same problem in a slightly different way – but according to a city spokesperson, it wouldn’t be implemented until the next TRPP review in 2026.

Tenants who aren’t covered by the policy face the same struggles in relocating, Fry said during the rezoning hearing. “It’s frustrating for me but I do think this is an otherwise excellent project and do support it,” Fry said.   

Gumapac wasn’t at all surprised that the rezoning was approved but said he felt vindicated and validated when Fry brought up considerations for tenants who weren’t eligible under the plan’s tenancy protections. Gumapac was the only tenant in his building who signed up to speak at the hearing. 

“Maybe development is just seen as an inevitability in this rapidly changing city. But I'm still going to try to use my voice,” Gumapac said.

If you’ve got more thoughts about this story, ideas for future coverage, or have a tip or lead, you can reach me at [email protected] 

THE AGENDA

🏒 It was a wild game for the Canucks last night, eventually losing 4-3 in overtime to the St. Louis Blues in a battle for the last playoff spot in the Western Conference. Brock Boeser scored an epic goal with three seconds left in the third period to send the game to OT, helping Vancouver secure one point in the standings. They’re now one point behind the Blues for the final playoff berth with 13 games left in the season. [Reddit]

💻 Vancouver shouldn’t cancel the 55 active contracts they have with U.S. vendors, City Manager Paul Mochrie said. Most of the city’s U.S. spending is for software systems and there would be “operational impacts” if the contracts were terminated, Mochrie said. This recommendation comes after staff were directed by council to look at their contracts and agreements with U.S. suppliers in an effort to “Buy Canadian” amid the tariff dispute. [CityNews]

🚓 Vancouver police say their new $5 million task force on the Downtown Eastside is getting results, in a one-month update on the nascent program “targeting organized criminals, violent offenders, and street disorder.” Increasing police patrols in the neighbourhood has resulted in 197 weapons seizures (a 258 per cent increase) and a 25 per cent average decrease in assaults per day, according to the VPD. In February, the city described it as a “long-term initiative,” but on Thursday the VPD said the task force would be in place for six months before being re-evaluated. [VPD, COV, VIA]

📨 March 30 is the last day applications will be accepted for a short-lived provincial program meant to incentivize homeowners to build secondary suites on their properties. In part, it’s because the federal government is launching a similar program with double the funding. [CBC]

🏗️ The province has given the green light to a long-awaited social housing and detox facility development in East Van. The site at Clark St. and 1st Ave. will include 97 rental homes and 91 detox beds. Construction is expected to take three years and be ready for use in 2028. [Vancouver Sun]

By-election roundup 

👮 We asked Ralph Kaisers about his 2022 endorsement of Ken Sim and the ABC party when he was the head of the Vancouver Police Union in our profile on ABC’s byelection candidates. A recent article from The Tyee’s Jen St. Denis dug further into that and a few of Kaiser’s other past comments and controversies on law enforcement issues, including his alleged advice to union members in the aftermath of Myles Gray’s death at the hands of Vancouver police officers. [Vancity Lookout, The Tyee]

🪑 We missed an event in our recent story on all-candidates meetings. The Carnegie Housing Project will be putting candidates on the figurative hot seat at their by-election event on Thursday, March 27 at 6 pm in the Carnegie Theatre. [Vancity Lookout, X] 

PHOTO OF THE DAY

An adorable shot of a wee baby hummingbird at meal time.

EVENT GUIDE

Vancouver Cherry Blossom Food Festival | Mar. 21 - Apr. 27 | Various locations, Metro Vancouver | Free

East Van Workers Assembly | Sunday, March 23, 11 am | 601 Keefer St. | Free

Rally to Save the Bus | Sunday, March 23, 1 pm | Metrotown Station | Free

City Council candidate meetings | Mar. 26, 27, & Apr. 1 | Various times and locations | Free

The Dark Eighties: Cave of Bats Dance Party | March 28, 10:30 pm | The Biltmore Cabaret | Tickets $10 

Ultimate 90s Night | March 29, 10:30 pm | The Fox Cabaret | Tickets $16

It’s a (Tumblin’) Party dammit! | Saturday, March 29, 10 pm | The Well Studios at City Centre Motor Hotel | Tickets $10 

Meeting with Vancouver head planner Josh White | Monday, March 31st, 6:30 pm | Britannia Community Centre (1655 William St.) | More info

Langara Open House | Thursday, April 3, 4 pm | Langara College | Free

Opening reception for new exhibits | Saturday, April 5, 2 pm | Equinox Gallery | Free

Blossom Block Party | Saturday, April 5, 2 pm | Dunsmuir Patio at Bentall Centre | Free

COMMUNITY HIGHLIGHTS

• A malty little neon operation in Brewery Creek is about to launch their Actually Canadian Pilsner in a sly shot at Molson [VIA] 

• Comedian David Cross has some special material in store for his Vancouver show on Saturday [Georgia Straight]

• Be sure to score your big discount on lettuce this week [Reddit]

• Take it with a grain of salt, but this report found Canadians are a lot less happy than 10 years ago [CBC]

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GAME TIME

Today’s wordle is a favourite symbol of spring time. Can you work out what it is?