*Metrotown Community Rally & Paint-in Against the Silver Avenue Demovictions*
When: Wednesday May 31st 2017 5pm to 7pm
Where: Corner of Beresford and Silver Avenue (Just south-west of Metrotown Skytrain Station)
The rally will include a few speakers from the community, and the paint-in will paint anti-demoviction and pro-community slogans and art on the evicted building. Paint and brushes will be provided, although you’re welcome to also bring your own.
Two years ago, Belford Properties bought the two large apartment buildings at the corner of Silver Avenue and Beresford. The City of Burnaby granted Belford Properties a rezoning permit, which allows them to build the “Sun Towers Metrotown.” This two-condo-tower, championed as the “luxury… beacon of cosmopolitan sophistication”, will not house the more than 200 residents displaced from their community by this development, and who cannot afford to buy or rent a new condo. Adding insult to injury, Belford denied recent residents (who accounted for the majority occupants of the buildings) the full eviction compensation they are due following a demoviction in Burnaby.
The City of Burnaby’s rezoning permit awarded Belford Properties the power to demolish 105 units of low-end market housing, even though low-end market housing units are the most important stock for City governments’ to protect. Here on Silver Avenue the demovictions are a tragedy for the residents who were evicted into the unknown; it’s also a tragedy for all 6,000 renters at risk in the Metrotown area who are watching their community crumble around them; and it is a tragedy for all working-class people throughout the Lower Mainland, who are losing still more rental apartments in an already scarce rental stock and in the midst of a vacancy-rate crisis.
The future is perilous for the remaining apartments in the Metrotown area. Burnaby council is setting up to pass their “Downtown” Metrotown development plan, which will rezone the entire area between Central Park and Royal Oak, and Kingsway and Imperial. If this plan passes, we will see a development spree. Condo developers have been holding onto their rezoning proposals in hopes this Plan will pass because then new development guidelines will streamline and fast-track their zoning proposals. Our rally and paint-in also speaks out against Mayor Corrigan’s Metrotown mass-displacement plan, in this new era of demovictions on steroids.
Stop Demovictions Burnaby invites you to join the Metrotown Community Rally & Paint-in to celebrate our resilience, offer moral support to the demovicted residents, and illustrate to the City of Burnaby that we will not go quietly! We pledge ourselves to stand up and fight against another building to be lost to corporate greed.