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.