Surrey was and remains the most affordable city in the Lower Mainland, something of which we are and should be proud. But our region-wide affordability crisis has demolished portions of our affordable housing stock, raised rents in the rental properties that remain, closed manufactured home parks and imposed ever-more stringent credit checks even on humble basement suites.

We will use the new provincial legislation to create rental-only areas of our city, designed to protect existing rental and to create incentives for new rental buildings to be constructed

We will permit greater flexibility in subdividing homes in existing low-density residential neighbourhoods into rental apartment buildings, provided the building envelope and aesthetic character are minimally affected, along the model of Victoria’s Rockland neighbourhood

We will conduct a Strata Rental Audit and a Secondary Suite Audit to assess the total quantity of housing in the city in which tenants have a part-time landlord and no caretaker

New bylaws will be enacted to provide strong incentives to nearby part-time landlords without caretakers to form into consortia to deliver more responsive maintenance routines, more affordable rent and more transferable tenancies Irrespective of whether landlords join these consortia, more proactive inspection and auditing of these units will continue in future

We will conduct a review of the currently unlicensed provincial “recovery house” system and create a municipal license for recovery houses and the option to convert de jure recovery houses that do not provide recovery services into boarding houses under a new boarding house license

We will create a robust Surrey Municipal Housing Corporation that will partner with Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, BC Housing and the non-profit sector but will also conduct projects on its own to create new, affordable rental and cooperative housing including three major initiatives

Purchasing existing residential property in low-density neighbourhoods and subdividing for rental within the building envelope.

Constructing new residential property on converted parking lot space both in formerly private ground-level parking lots and on surplus municipal parking lots incorporating new residential development into arts, community and educational development projects by the city

We will conduct a thorough homelessness audit including both street and non-street homelessness and enact a program of creating new shelters, transition housing and other facilities to meet the needs identified in the audit

We will work with adjacent and senior governmental jurisdictions to establish space-based rather than tenant-based rent controls in Surrey

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(604) 543-4032