Non-profit thrift stores in Metro Vancouver struggle as rents soar

CBC News

· Posted: May 26, 2025 11:03 AM EDT | Last Updated: 7 hours ago

The operators of non-profit thrift stores successful Metro Vancouver accidental the region's costly existent property marketplace is making it hard for them to marque money, and that's keeping them from being capable to assistance their communities.

Burnaby Association for South East Side (BASES) Family Thrift Store successful Burnaby, B.C., says it volition soon person to adjacent due to the fact that of progressively unaffordable rent.

"We cognize we tin tally a palmy business. We've done it for 12 years and we surely tin proceed that," said BASES president Peggy Woodruff.

"But we just can't spend the rent."

Woodruff says her thrift store has raised much than $1 cardinal for children and families successful her community. But aft each these years, she's getting acceptable to adjacent the store's doors.

Rent for the store started astatine $10 a quadrate ft erstwhile it archetypal opened much than a decennary ago, she says. It's present being raised to $40 a quadrate foot. 

WATCH | Thrift stores look eviction amid rent hikes: 

Woodruff says for the past 18 months her enactment has tried looking for different abstraction to run its business. But truthful far, the hunt has not been successful.

"We've looked astatine implicit astir apt 80 properties successful Burnaby," she said. "The retail abstraction is very, precise tight."

'The nett is wholly gone'

In Surrey, SEVA Thrift Foundation committee subordinate Raj Arneja says the SEVA Thrift Store donated much than $100,000 to the assemblage successful its archetypal 7 years of operation. But the store's rent has astir tripled since it archetypal opened, and it hasn't had immoderate other wealth to manus retired successful the past 2 years.

"The nett is wholly gone," Arneja said. 

To help, the store became a non-profit-organization and past twelvemonth it was granted foundation status. Arneja says she hopes that tin assistance them entree grants. 

Rent power vs. creating much supply

Last twelvemonth a metropolis councillor successful New Westminster projected peculiar economical zones to assistance tiny businesses amid accelerated development, expanding onshore values and rising commercialized rents.

But Andrey Pavlov, a concern prof astatine Simon Fraser University's Beedie School of Business, says commercial rent power is not a solution — the absorption should beryllium expanding the existent property supply.

"We request to marque it casual and accelerated and harmless to put successful commercial, residential existent property truthful that radical bash that successful ample numbers," Pavlov said. 

"And past we physique a batch much than we presently have."

Pavlov says determination has been a chronic shortage of commercialized existent estate, conscionable similar the residential market.