Why Langley Renters Need Unions

Picture Jenna, a hypothetical Langley renter waiting nine months for a series of repairs that keep not happening. The bathtub drains slow. The kitchen fan rattles. The baseboard heater in her bedroom doesn't work. Her email chain with the property manager is twenty messages long, yet she is no closer to getting her bathtub, kitchen fan, or bedroom heater fixed that she was four months ago.

She is thirty-four, works full-time at a clinic in Willoughby, and lives with her seven-year-old in a one-bedroom near 200 Street because she couldn't find a two bedroom unit in her price range. Her son sleeps in the bedroom while she sleeps on the pull-out in the living room. She has not had a guest over in two years.

She pays on time. She does not complain loudly, because complaining loudly in a rental market this tight feels like an invitation for the landlord to find a reason, any reason, to hand her a notice and start over with a tenant who will gladly pay three hundred dollars more.

Jenna is not imagining this power imbalance. She is living inside it. And she is seemingly on her own.

What a tenant union actually does

A tenant union is the simplest answer to Jenna's situation, and the one most renters have never had explained to them. At its most basic, a tenant union is a group of renters who agree to act together instead of separately. Sometimes that is everyone in a single building. Sometimes it is every tenant of the same landlord across multiple buildings. Sometimes it is a neighbourhood-wide group that organizes block by block.

The unifying idea is that a landlord who can pick off one tenant at a time has all the leverage. A landlord facing forty tenants moving as one has almost none.

Joining usually starts small. Someone in the building reaches out to a local organizer through ACORN BC, the Vancouver Tenants Union, or Rent Strike Bargain. The organizer helps map the building: who lives where, what their issues are, who is willing to talk. Meetings happen in lobbies, laundry rooms, parks, or on Zoom. Once enough neighbours are on board, the union sends the landlord a letter laying out demands and asks for a meeting.

From there, depending on the response and how organized the building is, tenants can escalate through public pressure campaigns, complaints to the Residential Tenancy Branch, media coverage, picket lines, or in some cases a coordinated rent strike.

The kinds of issues tenant unions actually win on are the ordinary, grinding ones that define the renter experience in BC. Repairs that have been ignored for months or years. Pest infestations the landlord refuses to treat. Illegal rent increases. Renoviction notices used to clear out long-term tenants. Above-guideline rent increase applications dressed up as "necessary repairs." Harassment from a landlord trying to push someone out. Refusal to return a damage deposit. Dangerous conditions like mould, faulty wiring, or no heat in winter.

None of these are particularly rare problems for tenants to experience. They are the daily texture of renting in this province, and individually, they are exhausting and largely unwinnable. Collectively, they are exactly the kind of thing organized tenants resolve all the time.

Beyond the building level, tenant unions also do political work. They show up at city council to push for renter protections, demoviction policies, and inclusionary zoning. They lobby the province for vacancy control, for stronger eviction protections, and for legal recognition of the right to organize. They run candidates, endorse them, or hold them accountable when elected.

They are, in other words, the renter equivalent of what LandlordBC and the real estate industry have had for decades: an organized voice with a phone number politicians actually return.

The Status Quo is Unacceptable

As of early 2026, the median rent across all unit types in Langley sits at roughly $2,150 per month¹. A one-bedroom apartment averages around $1,800 in purpose-built rental stock and closer to $2,000 to $2,200 on the open market^{1, 2}. A standard two-bedroom apartment runs about $2,190 on average³.

A two-bedroom-plus-den, the kind of unit a family with a work-from-home parent or an older child who needs their own room actually requires, regularly rents for $2,600 to $2,900 in newer buildings near the future SkyTrain⁴.

The Township's new BC Builds project, marketed as 20 per cent below market, still pencils out near $1,850 a month for a two-bedroom unit. To keep that under the standard 30 per cent rent-to-income threshold, a household needs an after-tax income around $74,000⁵. For a single parent, a retail worker, a new graduate, or a newcomer, that math does not work.

CMHC calculated that a BC worker earning an average wage would need to work 198 hours a month to afford the average two-bedroom in Vancouver⁶. Full-time employment, for the record, is 150 hours a month. The arithmetic of rent in this region is an arithmetic of overtime, second jobs, roommates into your forties, or quietly moving back to your parents' basement in middle age.

British Columbia also has the highest eviction rate in Canada. Research out of UBC's Balanced Supply of Housing cluster found that more than 10 per cent of BC renters were evicted between 2016 and 2021, with immigrant renters evicted at the highest rates of all⁷. Roughly 600,000 British Columbians rent, about one-third of all households in the province and rising⁶.

The Metro Vancouver vacancy rate more than doubled in 2025 to 3.7 per cent⁸, the highest since 1988, and asking rents in Langley fell nearly 14 per cent for one-bedroom units in eight months². That sounds like relief until you remember the base we are falling from.

What the federal and provincial plans actually promise

The federal and provincial governments are actively moving to address this crisis. Ottawa launched Build Canada Homes in September 2025 with a $13 billion initial budget, promising to unlock public land, finance affordable construction, and partner with non-profits and provinces⁹. Budget 2025 committed $25 billion in new housing measures. The BC government's Homes for People plan caps rent increases at 2.3 per cent for 2026, provides a $400 annual renter tax credit, banned most personal-occupancy evictions in five-plus-unit buildings, and funds the Rental Protection Fund so non-profits can buy at-risk buildings before REITs do¹⁰.

These are real wins. They are also nowhere near enough on their own.

The federal Parliamentary Budget Officer reviewed Build Canada Homes and estimated the new agency will add about 26,000 units over five years. That is a 2.1 per cent bump in completions against the baseline¹¹. Meanwhile, overall federal housing spending is projected to fall 56 per cent by 2028-29 as older National Housing Strategy programs expire¹¹. The government says it wants to double construction. The arithmetic says the opposite is in motion.

Supply matters. But supply alone, without tenants organized to push back on prices and conditions, does not translate into affordability the way political talking points suggest.

Why building more homes is not enough

The standard pro-supply story goes like this: Build more high-end units. Wealthier households move up. Older, cheaper units become available to people further down the income ladder. Everyone wins.

It is called filtering, and in a perfect market with perfect competition, it would work, eventually. Vancouver urbanist Erick Villagomez has pointed out that the assumptions behind filtering fall apart in real cities: supply is not elastic at every price point, land and zoning constraints block affordable construction, and vacated units often get renovated and repriced upward rather than flowing downward¹².

In British Columbia, the filtering story breaks down in a more specific way. BC has rent control tied to the tenant, not the unit. When you leave your apartment, your rent cap leaves with you, and the landlord can list the same suite at whatever the market will bear. This is called vacancy decontrol, and it creates a direct financial incentive for landlords to force long-term tenants out. Defer the maintenance. Let the unit decline. Find a reason. Turn over the tenant. Raise the rent^{6, 13}. ACORN BC has run a vacancy control campaign in this province for years^{6, 13}. In 2018, tenants asked the BC Rental Housing Task Force to close the vacancy decontrol loophole. The government declined, repeating the landlord industry's own talking point that rent control would discourage construction¹⁴. Then, to make matters worse, the province expanded the power of landlords to apply to the Residential Tenancy Branch for rent increases above the annual cap after completing "necessary" repairs¹³.

What a REIT actually is

If you have heard the term REIT thrown around in housing coverage and never been entirely sure what one is, you are in the majority.

REIT stands for Real Estate Investment Trust. The simplest way to think about it is this: a REIT is a company whose only job is to own real estate, collect rent, and hand most of that rent back to its investors as a regular payout. A few of the largest residential REITs in Canada, like Canadian Apartment Properties REIT (CAPREIT), together own tens of thousands of apartment units across the country.

Investors can buy shares in a REIT the same way one might buy shares in any other publicly traded company. Wealthy individuals and institutional investors, including pension funds and insurance companies, buy them in much larger volumes. The appeal is straightforward. A REIT exists to extract the maximum possible cash flow out of buildings full of working-class renters and route that cash flow upward, mostly to people who already own a lot.

Here is where the part most Canadians have never been told comes in: While regular Canadian corporations pay corporate income tax on any money before it reaches shareholders, REITs do not.

Under federal tax rules, a qualifying REIT is treated as a flow-through entity, meaning the trust itself pays no corporate tax as long as it distributes most of its rental income to its unitholders²⁸.

The investor pays tax on what they receive, but the trust itself is exempt from the corporate income tax that an ordinary business would owe on the same earnings. In effect, REITs operate as a vehicle that lets people who already have substantial capital buy into rental housing on terms unavailable to almost anyone else, while the rental units themselves are taxed less aggressively than they would be in any other corporate form. Researchers and tax-fairness advocates have argued for years that this preferential treatment costs the federal government meaningful tax revenue, and rewards exactly the kind of corporate ownership of rental housing that drives the affordability problems in the rest of this article²⁹.

A REIT is not, in other words, just a financial product. It is a tax structure designed in Ottawa that turns the apartment Jenna lives in into an asset class, gives wealthy investors a tax-advantaged way to own a piece of it, and creates legal pressure on the people running the building to push her rent as high as the market will bear, every year, forever.

The more rent extracted, the higher the distribution to unitholders. The more efficiently a long-term tenant can be replaced with a higher-paying one, the better the REIT performs at its next earnings call.

This is the real meaning of "the housing market." Not a mysterious natural force. Rather, it is a specific tax-advantaged ownership structure, written into Canadian law, working exactly as designed.

The bigger structural problem is that much of Canada's existing rental stock is no longer owned by the family landlord of imagination. It is owned by financialized firms, meaning REITs, private equity funds, asset managers, and institutional owners whose legal duty is to maximize returns for investors. Housing researcher Martine August has documented how REITs grew from owning zero Canadian apartment units in 1996 to controlling nearly 200,000 by 2021, with the top 25 financial landlords now holding more than 330,000 rental units nationally¹⁵.

These firms charge higher rents, raise rents more aggressively, and file evictions at higher rates than family-scale landlords, with the steepest premiums in lower-income and racialized neighbourhoods¹⁵. Housing analyst Steve Pomeroy has calculated that Canada lost over 550,000 affordable rental units between 2011 and 2021, largely because financial firms bought older affordable buildings and repositioned them upward¹⁶.

New supply cannot catch up if existing affordable supply is being extracted faster than governments can replace it. Which is where the piece most people never hear about comes in.

The myth of the middle class

Before going further, it is worth pausing on a phrase that shapes a lot of political conversation in this country and does more damage than almost any other: "middle class."

Most Canadians identify as middle class. The federal government talks constantly about defending the middle class. Entire marketing campaigns are built around it. It feels like the largest and safest place to stand.

It is also mostly a fiction. Or more precisely, it is a story designed to obscure where you actually sit in the economy.

There are really two classes that matter when you are talking about housing. There is the ownership class, meaning the people and firms who own capital, including real estate, stocks, REITs, private equity stakes, and other income-producing assets. They make money without working, because their money works for them. Then there is the working class, meaning everyone who sells their labour, or cannot sell enough of it, in order to live. If you rent, if your paycheque is most of your income, if losing your job would put you in crisis within months, you are working class. That remains true whether you have a university degree, a professional salary, or a LinkedIn profile that says "senior."

The ownership class understands this perfectly. They have complete class consciousness. In BC, landlords organize through LandlordBC, an industry association with direct access to ministers and municipal councils¹⁷. REITs have investor coalitions. Real estate boards fund elections. Developers show up at municipal public hearings in suits with prepared remarks. They fund campaigns against rent control, against inclusionary zoning, and against density that would lower their property values. They are engaged in active, organized class conflict every single day, and they are winning, because they know exactly who they are and what they want.

Working people, meanwhile, are taught to believe we are something called "middle class," a category with no equivalent political organization, no shared identity, and no collective instinct to act. We are encouraged to see ourselves as individual strivers who might one day become owners, and therefore should not make trouble now. We are encouraged to blame other working-class people, newcomers, unhoused neighbours, younger renters with roommates, for what a financialized housing market is doing to all of us.

The phrase "middle class" does exactly what it is meant to do. It pacifies. It divides. It turns solidarity into embarrassment. This is not a theory. It is a tool, and it has been working on us for decades.

The counter-tool, and the BC history most of us were never told

Tenant unions are how working people take that tool apart. And in BC, the fight for them is older than most readers realize.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, tenants across BC organized into building and neighbourhood associations, formed the BC Tenants Organization, and under the leadership of longtime Vancouver housing organizer Bruce Yorke, pressed provincial parties to recognize tenant collective bargaining rights^{18, 19}.

In 1972, the BC NDP adopted collective bargaining rights for renters as a pillar of its campaign platform. The BC NDP won the election. Then the Barrett government betrayed the promise. Instead of collective bargaining, it implemented vacancy control, the consolation prize. Within a few years the next Social Credit government eliminated vacancy control altogether^{18, 13}.

The policy gain, hard won through years of tenant organizing, lasted roughly half a decade. A year after the 1972 betrayal, the BC Law Reform Commission rejected a tenant proposal to legislate collective bargaining outright, with landlord and real estate interests leading the opposition²⁰.

In 2018, tenants again asked the BC government, now under a different BC NDP premier, to recommend vacancy control through the Rental Housing Task Force. The government again declined¹⁴.

This pattern matters. It tells BC renters that the path through electoral politics alone, without organized tenant power behind it, produces apologies and delays, and that even real wins can be reversed by the next government. The BC government has done meaningful things for renters, the rent cap, the renoviction ban, the Rental Protection Fund, because it has been pushed to. It has refused to do the bigger things, like vacancy control or collective bargaining rights, because nothing has yet pushed it hard enough.

The parallel to labour is exact. Canadian workers did not receive the constitutional right to meaningful collective bargaining because governments got around to it. They received it in 2007, in the Supreme Court's Health Services decision, after more than a century of strikes that were illegal when they happened and wages won one picket line at a time²¹. Workers built the power first. The law caught up later.

Tenant unions work the same way. Rent Strike Bargain, a grassroots BC campaign launched in 2020, has named three organizing pillars drawn directly from that labour history: fostering tenant-labour solidarity, seeding new tenant unions across the province, and winning collective bargaining rights for renters^{13, 22}.

That solidarity work is already paying off. RSB has earned formal endorsements from the Vancouver District Labour Council, Unite Here Local 40, CUPE locals in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, the Teaching Support Staff Union at SFU, the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers' Association, and the BCGEU Provincial Executive, among many others¹³. A tenant-labour alliance is exactly the formation that produced the 1983 Solidarity Coalition, the largest social movement in post-sixties BC²³, and it is being rebuilt now.

BC already has the scaffolding. BC ACORN runs five chapters across Metro Vancouver, counts roughly 19,000 provincial members, and campaigns for vacancy control and legal recognition of tenant organizing²⁴. The Vancouver Tenants Union, descended directly from the 1970s Vancouver Tenants Council that Yorke helped build, organizes against displacement and demoviction across the city²⁵.

Rent Strike Bargain organizes provincially through Regional Pods, local working groups that map renters in a given area, connect them with existing unions, and eventually launch new tenant unions for their city or region¹³.

In 2022, San Francisco passed a bylaw requiring landlords to meet annually with organized tenants and bargain in good faith under threat of penalty²⁶. Washington, DC, prohibits landlord interference with tenant organizing²⁷. None of it would be on paper anywhere without tenants who organized first.

All of this unfolds on unceded Indigenous territories, a context the founders of the BC tenant movement have named explicitly. Selling land was the foundational tool of BC's colonial project, and the commodification of property continues to shape who profits from housing and who is displaced¹³. Housing justice in this province cannot be separated from that history.

What Langley is missing is a Regional Pod of our own. Jenna, waiting for her repair, is not actually alone. She is simply not yet connected to the thousands of people in her community who would stand with her.

The part that is on us

Policy matters. Build Canada Homes, BC Builds, the Rental Protection Fund, the renter tax credit, the rent cap, the renoviction ban, all of it matters, and none of it is enough. Governments can be pressured into doing more. They can also be pressured into doing less, and gains made in one decade can be erased in the next. Which direction the pressure goes depends, always, on who is organized.

The ownership class is organized. It has been for a long time.

The working class, which is most of us, whether that word feels comfortable yet or not, mostly is not. The path out of this housing crisis is the one tenant unions around the world, and across British Columbia, are already walking. It is the path that turns good policy into real affordability and defends the gains already won.

Getting involved with BC ACORN, the Vancouver Tenants Union, Rent Strike Bargain, or the work of seeding a Langley Regional Pod is not optional activism. For renters, it is the material path that promises the greatest possibility of a true resolution to this nightmare housing crisis.

As the organizers of Rent Strike Bargain put it: unions at work have brought us a long way. Now it is time for a union at home¹³.

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