Kelowna housing issues in sharp focus during Friday ribbon cutting – Okanagan | 24CA News
British Columbia’s housing minister opted out of visiting Kelowna’s tent metropolis whereas on an Okanagan cease this week, prompting criticism from one in all its residents.
“I prefer not to be a tourist of these types of situations,” B.C. Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon stated Friday, when requested if he was going to go to the encampment throughout a ribbon reducing at Kelowna’s latest 68-unit reasonably priced housing complicated.
“I will say that the mayor and I have had four conversations in the last six months about the challenges our BC Housing staff are on the ground. We know that challenge is real. We need more shelters, we need more supportive housing.”
A girl who goes by the title Mama Kjaer is among the rising quantity of people that reside within the makeshift shelters, evening after evening.
She says she began dwelling there when her husband died in April 2021.
Upon listening to about Kahlon’s determination to not tour the realm, she had some instant ideas.
“He doesn’t have time to come and see this mess, aren’t we proud of Kelowna?” Kjaer stated. “It’s sad. It’s pathetic. I think it’s (showing) a little shortcoming on his job.”
Kjaer stated she’d like him to see how, when housing just isn’t accessible, it impacts all components of day-to-day life.
“Even a dog is entitled to shelter, food and water and a bath,” she stated.
“I think that every civil servant should come down and try and live as we do for the first month. Start out with no ID, no anything. I think it’d be a perfect training ground.
“If it doesn’t change your mind completely about how they look at us, it will give them a little compassion, anyway.”
Khalon just isn’t with out compassion for and consciousness of the housing points in B.C., he defined on the opening of the reasonably priced housing complicated that has been 20 years within the making.
Every day, he stated, he wakes up and thinks about individuals which can be in encampments.
“And that’s what drives me in the work I do. So there’s blame to go around everywhere. But in the end, the goal for us all of us has to be to get people the housing they need,” he stated.
Even the challenge unveiled Friday reveals cracks within the present system.
“This project was started in 2003,” he stated. “They weren’t able to secure funding ’til now. And that just shows you how long we’ve had a lack of funding in place.”
Kahlon says reduction is on the best way with the not too long ago handed Housing Supply Act, “which sets specific housing targets for B.C. communities to tackle the provincial housing crisis,” he stated.
The new laws permits the province to mandate municipalities to fast-track housing tasks. However, Kelowna just isn’t on the listing of the primary 10 cities to get the order, neither is some other Okanagan group.
The province plans to announce the following 10 communities that must meet particular housing targets in the direction of the tip of the yr, however Kahlon wouldn’t touch upon whether or not any Okanagan communities will probably be on that listing.
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