New West looks into rental cooling rules

City councillors in New Westminster have passed a motion to look into putting in a bylaw that requires rental units in the city to provide cooling equipment to tenants.

Councillor Nadine Nakagawa was one of two to bring the motion forward, and says it doesn’t necessarily mean landlords will be required to install air conditioning units.

“If you rent out a basement unit, that might just already be cool enough so you don’t need to include anything. So I wanted to have enough flexibility that we can find solutions that work for each situation, but that it is the landlords responsibility to provide that,” she told CityNews.

The motion notes that the city’s current business and licencing bylaw around rentals “does not list requirements for cooling equipment or measures” but does for heating in such units.

It says extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, and that that is “increasing vulnerabilities,” particularly for those who are lower income.

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Staff are now being directed to “explore the tools available for the City to adopt a bylaw that requires rental units to have cooling equipment, or passive means, that prevents at least one room of the unit from exceeding the standard recommendation of 26 C.”

Nakagawa says the bylaw would apply to all rental units in New Westminster.

She notes most of the 28 residents in the city who died in the 2021 heat dome lived in older, low-rise apartment buildings. She adds New Westminster saw the highest rate of death in the province related to the catastrophic heat event.

“The area where people died in the heatdome is the older rental buildings, the two- and three-storey walk-up buildings that are from the 1970s, 1950s, and those are the ones that we saw people who are most at risk, people who are low-income, elders, people on fixed-income. So it has to cover all buildings,” she said of any new potential rules.

Related video: Advocates call for rules to keep Vancouver rentals cooler during heat wave

While it’s still early days, Nakagawa says enforcement of any bylaw could include tying requirements to business licences, which are required in New Westminster for landlords who own more than five units.

“We shouldn’t have people dying in their buildings, I hope that that would be enough to enforce. But apparently it’s not. So, again, I think tying the businesses to it would mean that, in order to operate a business in the city — which rental buildings are — you would have to provide this,” the councillor explained.

In addition to exploring bylaw options, the motion also asks the city to check in with B.C.’s housing minister to ensure that any required upgrades as a result of new potential rules “would not trigger legal renovictions or the Above Guideline Rent Increase permissible by the Province.”