A popular restaurant near the East Vancouver-Burnaby border says it has no choice but to close after its landlords hiked the rent 120 per cent.
Charles Tsang opened Liberté Café on Vaness Avenue near Boundary Road in Vancouver’s Joyce-Collingwood neighbourhood in 2020.
The restaurant is known for its Filipino dishes and Ube pastries.
Tsang said it was a hard go building the business up from the ground up amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
But he said over five years they built up a loyal clientele from all over the region.
He said a more manageable rent hike could have been handled by raising prices or cutting hours, but he said the scale of the increase is just too much.
“A 120-per cent increase, nobody could survive,” he said.
“Disturbing, that’s the only word. We put in a lot of time, effort. Lots of sleepless nights … It’s like I am giving my kids away. It’s really sad and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
The neighbourhood has long been a food and community hub for newcomers, and is where many Filipinos settled decades ago because of affordable housing and access to religious services.
Sammie Jo Rumbaua, with the Joyce Street Action Network, said that is changing, with rapid development in the area.
“Everyone is really scared of being renovicted from their neighbourhood,” she said.
“We don’t have a Filipino cultural centre right now, so we used these places to gather.”
Tsang said he wants the provincial government to make legislative changes to protect commercial tenants from excessive rent hikes.
“For residential, they do have Residential Tenancy Branch to control the rent increase,” he said.
“Unfortunately for commercial, no, whatever the landlord wants to increase, it’s up to them.”
Tsang said he hopes to reopen the business in a new location, but that rents across the city have increased sharply, and due to inflation the cost to renovate the new property will be double what he paid to open the original location.
Foodies hoping to get a taste of Liberté Café’s menu will need to do so before February.