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You thought illegal suites didn’t exist in Vancouver? You are so wrong

March 17th, 2017 · No Comments

When I was first heard about Adriane Carr’s motion to have staff looking at why the city is still shutting down illegal suites, I thought she was surely wrong.

After all, when COPE and Larry Campbell swept to power in 2002, one of their first major actions was to declare that all secondary suites were allowed. (It didn’t mean that all of them had official permits, which require them to meet certain building-code conditions, but they were at least not illegal, no mater what.)

But it turns out there are a whole bunch of, not secondary suites, but tertiary and quadernary (is that a word?) suites in the city that no one envisioned dealing with back in 2003.

I didn’t have the information in time for my Globe story that detailed one particular case and some others talking about the issue, but there are apparently 7,000 of these kinds of suites in the city, according to the always helpful Jens von Bergmann.

Carr’s motion to have staff look at ways to legalize these passed, so we’ll see what happens next.

 

 

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