Maple Ridge's Rental Market Is in Crisis. The Evidence Is on Every Street.

Vacancy rates near zero. Rents up forty percent in five years. Tenants in buildings facing renoviction or demolition with nowhere affordable to go. Maple Ridge's rental crisis is not abstract — it is happening to real people right now.

The woman who has rented the same apartment in Maple Ridge for eleven years received her notice in April. The building has been sold. The new owner is converting the units to strata. She has ninety days and a rental market with a vacancy rate that, in the last survey, registered below one percent.

She is looking. She has been looking for six weeks. What she can find in Maple Ridge at a rent she can absorb on her income is either unavailable — already leased before she can apply — or in physical condition that she is not willing to bring her children into.

Her situation is not unusual. The Maple Ridge Post has spoken to a dozen tenants in similar circumstances in the past two months. Renovictions, demovictions, rent increases at renewal that exceed any reasonable measure of affordability. The causes are multiple — low vacancy, rising operating costs, a provincial tenancy framework that has improved but still contains significant gaps in tenant protection.

Maple Ridge has limited tools for protecting existing rental stock. Secondary suites, which provide a significant share of the community's affordable rental inventory, are being converted to owner-occupied use as homeowners respond to their own cost pressures.

What Maple Ridge can do — and has not done with sufficient urgency — is use its development approval process to protect and replace existing rental stock, require rental replacement as a condition of demolition permits, and advocate for the provincial rental protection framework changes that would give municipalities more authority to preserve affordable rental housing.

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