The City of Mission will write to the province in an effort to regulate commercial rent.
A motion from Mayor Paul Horn at Monday’s (June 2) council meeting to send a letter to the relevant ministries carried unanimously.
Horn’s notice of motion states that landlords—many from outside the community— are escalating commercial rents to levels that are increasing vacancies and undermining the viability of businesses and non-profits.
“Commercial rent escalation is a growing challenge in communities of Mission’s size across British Columbia, negatively impacting the ability of local retailers to sustain or grow their operations,” Horn’s notice of motion reads.
Horn said council generally lets the market address things, but it hasn’t proven out in Mission’s downtown.
“A lot of the landlords who are benefiting from those downtown revitalizations are displacing local people and they aren't necessarily creating jobs. And the real reason we did this is to create a robust neighbourhood where people could actually live, work and do business,” Horn said.
“So if people aren't going to be reasonable and they're just going to try and sort of force the folks who have lived with them through the hard times out the door as soon as they start to have a little bit of a nicer store frontage, shame on them.”
Coun. Jag Gill said this is an important issue to local businesses and hopes the province moves on it quickly.
“In a community like ours, where we're not seeing enough commercial space – especially up in Cedar Valley or along the Lougheed Highway – landlords are using that as a tactic to negotiate rent increases,” Gill said.
“I think the difference between residential and commercial is, in commercial, when you’re signing a lease, the rent can increase by 500 per cent with no regulation. In fact, also in commercial rents, landlords can also say, ‘We want a percentage of your sales.’ So there's a lot of flexibility for landowners to kind of pinch or squeeze small businesses out.”
Mission will request that the province work with interested local governments to create a program to regulate commercial rent increases and support the long-term sustainability of small businesses in community commercial centres.
Horn credited New Westminster Coun. Tasha Henderson, who brought the issue forward to UBCM and has been working with other municipalities.
The mayor said the downtown incentive program introduced by the city in 2013 invested a significant amount in improvements.
“The upshot of it is that we ended up incentivizing business development but when we improved the properties, landlords increased rent, started charging triple net for the first time and all of that investment by the municipality has sort of displaced the vacancies,” Horn said.
