A tongue-in-cheek Twitter account is shining light on the scarce offerings of Vancouver’s unaffordable rental market.
@dearyvrlandlord, which has over 1,100 followers and counting, mocks local rental property listings on Craigslist.
The Tweets tend to jokingly highlight high rental prices for properties with questionable amenities and living conditions.
The 33-year-old Vancouver resident behind the account, who requested that Global News only used her first name to remain anonymous, says she started posting Tweets back in July of last year.
“CJ,” as she wants to be known, and her partner were given an eviction notice after their landlord decided to move back into the house, and they were left with a seemingly impossible task of finding an affordable rental home in Vancouver.
CJ says she was looking for apartments on Craigslist and was just so frustrated with what she was seeing, she decided to share her disappointment on social media.
“There is so much going on with rental housing in Vancouver and given how dire the situation is, I just thought I’d get the word out there about it,” she says. “How much people are charging for what they are charging is depressing.”
Despite the frustration, CJ is taking the challenges of Vancouver rental market in stride.
“I am very careful not to attack,” she says. “My posts are not mean. I think they are just frustrated and sarcastic.”
CJ says she spends about 30 minutes a day browsing through Craigslist looking for her next Tweet.
She says the reaction so far has been pretty positive.
“I like that some people are starting to comment on it,” says CJ. “I want more people to comment on it and share their own stories. I don’t want to seem like I am preaching to people, I want to hear people’s opinions as well because we are all in it together.”
Sauder School of Business Associate Professor and housing economist Thomas Davidoff says there are too many people chasing too few homes in Vancouver.
“It’s very difficult to build new housing supply here, as everybody knows,” says Davidoff. “A lot of this city is either water or mountains or devoted to single-family homes because of zoning. More and more people want to come here and when they crowd in, you get crappy apartments for a lot of money, which is what this website lampoons.”
Davidoff says increasingly living in Vancouver is a luxury, but measures such as modifying the tax environment that “punishes” people who live and work in Vancouver and rewards property investors as well as changing zoning requirements can be taken to lessen the pressure on the rental market.
CJ says there is now a Toronto-based spin-off of her Twitter account called @dearYYZlandlord, which is trying to highlight Vancouver isn’t the only city in Canada stuck with a challenging rental market.
“I thought Vancouver was bad,” says CJ. “But the stuff in Toronto they are coming up with is brutal.”
Davidoff says rental housing is a problem facing many coastal, highly sought after cities.
“They are great places to make money, they are nice places and they are usually pretty restrictive about what can get built,” he says. “That combination of the ‘desirable’ and government restrictions on what gets built makes rentals very expensive.”
Comments