To the editor:
I have just read a really shocking story in BC’s The Tyee online newspaper about homelessness and people being driven out of Vancouver by high rents and aggressive gentrification.
A homeless man was reported to have died in a Tim Horton’s coffee shop and had basically lived there for the last ten years. It is forecast that if this housing crisis continues, Vancouver may return to the shanty towns formed in the city during the Great Depression. One can only hope that Kelowna mayor Colin Basran is listening, and not just mouthing a campaign pledge to house most of the homeless people in Kelowna.
Food and shelter are the basics of human life. If there is no shelter provided in the near future, it is easy to imagine how terrible it would be to witness Kelowna as home to a depressing city of hundreds of tents with myriads of the homeless aimlessly wandering around in a city where no one cares.
Laurence D. M. Marshall,
Kelowna