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Post by CRCP on Nov 21, 2006 10:51:44 GMT -5
Member's posts follow:
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Post by John Zeger on Nov 21, 2006 11:19:12 GMT -5
At the city council meeting on Nov. 20, 2006, it was like someone threw them a hot potato and they didn't know what to do with it. The subject was the Final Recommendations of the Task Force on Affordable and Special Needs Housing and council seemed dazed and confused. You have to remember that this council is not used to solving problems especially in a bold way but rather with just rubber-stamping development applications. They were clearly out of their element here. Lots of negativity was heard from Councillors Andre Blanleil who was concerned with the impact the recommendations would have on dampening development, Carol Gran who didn't like several recommendations and blamed senior governments for putting this problem in their lap, and Colin Day who thought that the recommended housing corporation would create "a slippery slope" and pose a threat to the private sector. But the dumbest remark of the meeting came from Councillor Barrie Clark who bellowed that the whole exercise was not "a proper and productive procedure" as it wasn't city council's job to create affordable housing for people but rather the job of senior governments to put the money into people's pockets so that they could afford their accommodation. Seemingly totally out of touch with present day realities, Clark was ready to take his ball and bat and go home and declared that he wouldn't be supporting any of the recommendations of the Task Force. His attitude towards the disadvantaged in the city seemed to be let them eat cake and let the senior governments bake it for them and until that happens he wasn't going to budge. Will someone please explain to me how this guy gets re-elected everytime?
In the end council got rid of this hot potato and voted to send the Task Force's recommendations back to staff one more time so that they could get back to approving development applications.
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Post by John Zeger on Feb 1, 2008 11:40:56 GMT -5
That Kelowna was ranked the thirteenth least affordable city in a survey of five major Western countries is the shame of this city. And this disturbing reality is the consequence of the disastrous policies of Kelowna city council in the last decade.
City council has been following a policy of growth for growth’s sake and approving mostly high-end housing with very little thought given to the consequences for affordability or achieving a demographically balanced community. Their only criteria for giving residential projects their approval has been that they will bring people with bagfuls of money to the city. Now we have earned the reputation as having the most unaffordable housing market in Canada and one of the worst in the world.
What has Kelowna city council done recently to remedy the situation? It was in the fall of 2006 that city council received the tepid recommendations of the Task Force on Affordable and Special Needs Housing but immediately rejected some its better ideas such as a non-profit housing corporation as some of the ideologues on council such as Carol Gran muttered about it creating another level of bureaucracy because it might require a small number of staff to administer. It then took over a year to pass a bylaw to create more secondary suites after council nearly debated the subject to death. In the meantime, frustrated by the inaction of city council on the issue and to the embarrassment of council, city staff formulated their own policy which required developers to make affordable 50% of all additional units created in rezonings of multi-family projects to higher densities. City council sheepishly went along. And that is where we stand today with city council content with creating a couple of $300,000 units in a residential project and boasting that they have contributed to affordable housing. Is this a city council that we want for another three years?
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