On November 26, 2025, COPE Vancouver’s City Councillor Sean Orr put forward a very interesting motion for consideration by Council’s Standing Committee on Policy and Strategic Priorities.
This innovative Right of First Refusal motion included establishing a Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Policy, giving tenants the ability to purchase and turn their rental buildings into co-operatives, and establishing a city-wide right of first refusal for the City, non-profit housing providers, Indigenous governments, and other public bodies to purchase buildings for use as affordable non-market housing.
What many don’t realize is that over the long term, renters already pay the purchase price of the accommodation they live in. The owner of a rental building — at present typically an investment company or real estate investment trust — uses the rent collected to pay off a mortgage and to earn a profit.
Even if the rents, particularly on older buildings, are sometimes not large enough to cover the entire mortgage expense, the appreciation in the underlying worth of a property more than offsets the amount by which the landlord must top up the earnings from rent to cover the monthly payment. Costs are covered and profit is earned when the property is eventually sold for more than the original purchase price.
The new purchaser then takes out a now larger mortgage, and the process begins all over again. Typically, this new investor raises rents where possible and too often finds pretexts to evict tenants otherwise protected by residential tenancy laws.
The renter realizes none of the price lift, and nothing from their contribution to mortgage payments.
A key problem of course is that housing and land purchases have become rather lucrative investments, attracting those primarily interested in maximizing their profits. Tenants are seen as resources to be exploited. Building upkeep becomes an unwelcome cost.
UBC’s Housing Investment Resource Tools (HART) initiative characterizes the ‘housing as investment fallacy’ as “both economically unsound and socially destructive.” It is no longer news that Canada is facing a housing crisis, in no small part due to a significant mismatch between rents being charged and what low to middle income earners can afford.
The City of Vancouver’s penchant for building high rise towers and relaxing zoning restrictions has had the entirely predictable result of massively increasing land costs. As UBC professor Patrick Condon has explained in his book Broken City, this too has led to land speculation and inflationary housing costs.
A case in point – as I explained in an earlier blog – is the disastrous decision by City Council to permit three massive towers to be built on the current Safeway lot at Broadway & Commercial. The site was bought in 2013 for $22.2 million; by 2024 it was assessed at $139.9 million. Any housing built there will be too expensive for most renters.
Current owners, Crombie REIT, have even spoken with their investors about potentially now selling the site without building anything, in the name of “monetization of that asset.” This practice of ‘land flipping’ is known to be lucrative, as has been well documented in the Tyee article ‘Vancouver Is Extra Kind to Land Speculators’
Councillor Orr’s very creative proposal would see renters become owners of their now affordable homes by taking the investors out of the equation. Over time, a mortgage could be paid off in its entirety. Rental payments could then be dramatically reduced as they would only need to cover maintenance and property taxes.
Should the building ever sell, the renter or nonprofit — now owner — would realize a dividend from any rise in the property value.
Let’s hope Vancouver City Council gets behind Councillor Orr’s proposal. It is time renters had a piece of the action.
Daily atmospheric CO2 [Courtesy of CO2.Earth]
Latest daily total (November 23, 2025): 426.96ppm
One year ago (November 24, 2024): 424.48ppm
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