Rental housing a priority

Open letter to Mayor Colin Basran:

I woke up this morning and read something on Castanet, that seemed almost like a response to the letter that myself and someone else wrote in to castanet last week. You were addressing the problem with rentals.

I'm not a politician, and I have no interest in being one or being involved in the council of BC or Kelowna, but there is a huge problem with vacancy rates in the city and surrounding districts in or around Kelowna. 

I have been looking for a place to call home for coming on close to a year. The home I was previously living in was falling apart. With my family, including 4 small children, the house was no longer suitable as it was moulding, the roof and windows were no good, and the heaters in the house had stopped working. So we moved. The home we moved into was beautiful, unfortunately the landlord downstairs, liked to drink, and when he drank, he got loud, vulgar, and violent, and within the 27 days we lived there, he tried to have a physical altercation with me, and threatened to slap my fiancé in the face. So with 4 small children, you can understand our reasoning behind packing up and moving out of that house. 

With no time (or money) to move we were forced into my mother-in-law’s basement suite, way up in the mountains of Peachland. This basement suite is a small 650 sq. ft. 1 bedroom suite, so my fiancé and I live in the living room and the kids share a small bedroom. 

I hope you can understand my frustration with the rental market. And I do understand that the City of Kelowna is doing "what they can" to solve the problem.

My question to you is this. Why haven't you or the City of Kelowna implemented a vacant home tax as with Vancouver? Why has there not been a rental cap put on prices that landlords can legally ask someone to pay to rent their home? Did you know that I found a beautiful 3 bedroom house that would probably have just enough space in it to accommodate my family? Can you guess what the price of that rental was? Probably not, so let me tell you. That particular landlord was charging $4,000 a month plus utilities! That's over a thousand dollars per bedroom. That is completely unreasonable and unrealistic. A 2 bedroom house is $2,000 a month plus utilities! 

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that you probably are fortunate enough to own your home, so you have probably got enough space for you to relax after a long day in the office, maybe a pool for those hot summer days, possibly a hot tub for those cool nights. This is all speculation of course. But tell me this, do you remember a time in your life where you had to pay over $2,000 a month for a 2 bedroom home? I doubt it. 

So why cant City of Kelowna start there? 

Put a cap on rentals, implement a vacant home tax. Instead of figuring out how much money the city will earn in property taxes, start working for the people who pay taxes, the people who are struggling to live only to ensure that people who are already rich and such live so comfortably. It’s great that the city has approved 1,048 rental units, but how much are those places going to cost to rent? And are people like me and my family going to be able to find a suitable and affordable place to live in the next year? You probably can't answer that can you?

I would like very much to have a response to this letter, and one that may restore my faith in the abilities of people in your position to be able to look after the little guy. Mayor, I did not write this to cause any problems or to start your day off horribly. I wrote this letter to you because people like me are struggling day after day to find a place to call home.  

The people who are being forced out of Hiawatha trailer park because of the conditions of their homes have no where to go. What are you doing about that? Maybe they might find a place, maybe they won’t. Maybe they might, heaven forbid, end up homeless with their families, but in that case I guess we can thank you and the city of Kelowna for places like Inn from the Cold and the Gospel Mission. But would you take your children there? Would you want to eat that food? Sleep next to a person who just got their fix with a needle? I don't think so. 

Yes, you have approved rental units, but those units aren't immediately available. So what are we to do?

Shane Braniff