Senior struggles to find affordable housing in Vancouver
It’s a story too common among seniors, says executive director of the Seniors Services Society
By The Early Edition, CBC News Posted: Oct 15, 2015 2:48 PM PT Last Updated: Oct 16, 2015 6:49 AM PT
I could see this coming before I retired, so as soon as the less than golden handshake happened I left the area..didn’t really want to, but..glad now.
I feel for this guy..remember when $700 was a couple of mortgage payments? And so it goes, in Vancouver, the developer’s heaven, where nouveau riche real estate carpet bagger creeps like Rob Rennie, who made a fortune turning out locals for foreign investors, has opined that anyone but the rich should just forget about ownership of a free-standing home in Vancouver..live in a condo sardine tin, overpriced and under-built..and keeping Rennie in comissions for eternity, or until the tax bracket necessary for the purchase of any mini-home runs out of cash…
And though he is worshiped by the upper middle class twits who keep electing him, Gregor Robertson, who never met a developer he didn’t love, or a photo-op he would pass on, also has much to answer for..he promised, long ago, to deal with homelessness, anyone remember that? Robertson is nothing so much as the new version of ex-Vancouver Mayor Gordon Campbell, who would flash his pearly whites while signing off on another demo of perfectly good housing, only to have to deal with the crisis of leaky condos..anyone remember that?
When I left Vancouver in 2009, was paying $700 for a rather weird little one bedroom suite, right on E. 1st Ave., where the traffic noise ( what was once slated for Vancouver’s freeway, instead became one of the busiest arterial streets in the city) almost 24/7 kept me wearing earplugs every night to be able to sleep..and it did include most utilities..of course the bathroom was crawling with mold, and it had the ugliest large-format linoleum tiles in the world all through it, but the kitchen was old-fashioned and huge (which I loved) and there was decent storage and shared laundry, and I could do a bit of gardening in the rear yard, so, back in the day, I thought I was doing well..
Now this poor guy has to try and find a similar place to live, if he’s lucky..but he needs to face the reality of one of the the most expensive cities in the world…we seniors are not wanted, unless we have an independent income well beyond most pensions..there is no more subsidized anything for anyone with any income at all, and your once adequate pension – isn’t…
I recently read an article that stated that the boomer takeover was oversold..the reality was that our numbers were not increasing drastically, but in fact we are dying off at the usual rate and have not created a massive spike in government spending on housing or healthcare, anywhere…so that all the dire predictions of our ‘takeover’ of pensions, etc, has not happened, and isn’t likely to..
Well of course not, we are dying off probably because there is little to encourage us unless we are independently wealthy and can afford to live as we did when employed..and increasingly fewer of us in the Lower Mainland can afford to continue living, at all…
Left Over 