FIGHT FOR
HOUSING
SEAN ORR AND COPE’S
2025 BY-ELECTION
HOUSING PLATFORM
The housing market isn’t broken.
It’s working exactly as designed.
It’s designed to raise our rents, create homelessness, and enrich the powerful.
It’s designed to put the super-rich, landlords, and investors ahead of the rest of us.
Vancouver doesn’t have to be this way.
High rents and homelessness are not inevitable.
We can make housing affordable if we’re willing to fight for it.
STOP THE LOSS OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING
Between 2016 and 2021, Vancouver lost over 47,000 affordable homes to rent increases and demovictions. [1]
🗹 Close the loopholes that landlords use to jack up rents. Sean’s first priority is closing the vacancy loophole, which allows landlords to raise rent as much as they want between tenants.
🗹 Stop demovictions. In the Broadway corridor and across the city, affordable housing is being destroyed – while city-owned land sits vacant and exclusionary mansion districts don’t allow any rental or public housing. Demolitions are environmentally wasteful and produce massive amounts of carbon emissions. With a growing population, we need more housing, not less. Destroying dense, livable, housing in a housing crisis makes no sense.
🗹 Strengthen the tenant relocation and protection policy (TRPP) and apply strong measures city-wide and in all types of rental housing to ensure that violently displacing tenants is not a viable business model. Make developers coordinate redevelopments so renters get access to the same sized house, meeting the same accessibility needs, in their own neighbourhood. Leverage city-owned land for swing-site housing for tenants which can later serve as co-op or public housing.
🗹 Protect land held by non-profit community groups from sell-offs to speculative interests. Land owned by faith-based groups and other charitable or non-profit organizations should be mandated to give right of first refusal to another non-market user before selling to the private sector.
🗹 Bring back the renters office – with new enforcement powers – and give tenants an advocate who is empowered to fight for them. If Ken Sim blocks us from bringing back the renters office – Sean’s office will be the renter’s office.
TAX THE RICH TO END HOMELESSNESS
The same system that jacks up our rents pushes people into homelessness.
A study from the United States found that for every $100 the median rent increases, homelessness increases by 9%. [5]
🗹 End homelessness with a tax on the mansions of the super-rich. A progressive property tax of 1% on the value over $5 million could generate enough money to end homelessness in Vancouver.
🗹 Building new shelter-rate housing and fight like hell to have other cities, the province, and the federal government play their part in ending homelessness in BC for good.
🗹 Reverse Ken Sim’s cruel ban on supportive housing in Vancouver. We need more supportive housing to curb the growth of homelessness, support vulnerable seniors, and people with disabilities.
PERMANENTLY AFFORDABLE PUBLIC HOUSING
From the 1960s until the 1990s, governments in Canada invested in affordable housing. When they stopped, rents and homelessness skyrocketed.
🗹 Buy apartments and turn them into permanently affordable public housing and co-ops. One tool to do this would be to implement a right-of-first refusal policy that gives the city first priority in purchasing existing apartments that go up for sale to turn into public housing. Montreal’s municipal government has used this tool to save vital affordable housing in their City, and we can too.
🗹 Stop public land sell-offs that rip us off, and use public land for public benefits, including public housing. We need to build permanently affordable public housing for every income level and in every neighbourhood, in partnership with the provincial government, the federal government, host nations, and non-profits.
🗹 Make all neighbourhoods welcoming and supportive for people on all incomes, with affordable housing in every neighbourhood and with accessible and affordable retail and services.
🗹 Support, protect, and expand co-op housing and fight to renew leases for existing coops to preserve affordable homes, prioritize building new co-ops on City-owned land, and push other levels of government to make generational investments in co-op housing.
🗹 Support the development of community-led land trusts aimed at protecting land from speculative development and creating permanently affordable housing for public benefit.
FIGHT FOR HOUSING
We can make housing affordable if we’re willing to fight for it.
Over 2/3rds of people in Vancouver can’t afford the new market rate housing units that make up 84% of Vancouver’s 10-year housing targets. [6]
🗹 Give tenants the right to collectively bargain through tenants unions. When landlords are jacking up rents, starting a demoviction process, or providing unsafe living conditions, tenants deserve a formal legal right to stand together as a union and fight for their housing.
🗹 Continue to increase the Empty Home Tax. Apply a partial vacancy tax to the thousands of empty new builds which were exempted by Ken Sim, increase enforcement, and close the loopholes in the EHT that rich investors use to keep homes vacant.
🗹 Investigate and regulate REITs and other global big money flowing into our housing market and driving up our rents for the profit of investors elsewhere.
🗹 Establish maximum temperatures for units and mandate landlords keep buildings safe and inhabitable during heat waves. Air conditioning is not a luxury, but a matter of life and death for vulnerable residents including seniors and people with disabilities.
🗹 Create a landlord registry to track rents and crack down on bad landlords who turn breaking the law into a business model.
🗹 Sean Orr will be unapologetic and outspoken and fight for what we need on housing. In order to stabilize rents and win public housing for all, we need investments from all levels of government and other municipalities to make housing a human right, to treat affordable housing as a core public service like healthcare, and make housing affordable.
We want to show all levels of government that these ideas are popular.
Vancouver doesn’t have to be this way.
We can fight for housing. We can fight to protect tenants from demovictions and exploitation. We can fight like hell to end homelessness.
Together we can build the city we need.
Together we can take democracy back from the billionaires.
Let’s start the process on April 5th.
Next year, we finish the job and Evict Ken Sim.
Sean Orr
COPE Candidate