Cliquey Greedy City of Kelowna

 Kelowna is an overpopulated, expensive, greedy and cliquey city

As a former resident of Kelowna BC for twenty years I have observed the major changes that are happening in this fast growing city. It has become an extremely expensive area to rent or own housing. The population is now becoming too dense for the Kelowna area alone. Greedy developers are throwing up cheaply made housing units including tiny little micro suites with minimal space patios barely enough to hold two chairs. These type of units are asking somewhere in the range of approximately 1500 to 1700 hundred a month. The city and developers claim this is affordable house. Well, affordable housing it is not. Kelowna has become a worsened state filled with self privileged, money hungry, wine thirsty, arrogant snobs. It is not a friendly city by any means. There are many McMansion type homes that can be found in Kelowna and yes, there is the vineyards! Don't forget the wine. However, that is just the one side of the story. In the very centre of downtown it is a very different scene. There are the homeless and poor who hang about the Gospel Mission charity just to get something to eat. Many of these folks are ill or addicted. Many have lost hope. The BC welfare shelter rates have not increased for about 20 years. No person can find living accommodations for a meagre $375 per month (singles) especially in Kelowna but this goes for the whole of BC as well. The traffic in Kelowna as of 2020 is horrendous. The Harvey highway running through Kelowna is jam packed with vehicles like sardines in a tin can. What once use to maybe take five or ten minutes to drive from once place in Kelowna to another can now sometimes take one half hour to an hour to reach a destination. Another topic that comes to mind is how Kelowna is not pet friendly. Most landlords forbid tenants to have a dog or cat. I once volunteered many years ago at the Kelowna SPCA. There were many unwanted animals that were put down because there was no where for them to live on a permanent basis. It was very heart wrenching. Many Kelowna residents are forced to sacrifice their pets just to have a place to live. There are no cheap rentals in Kelowna including the run down accommodations. Again, it's all about greed and pushing the working poor and homeless into further poverty. Those on the so called upper scale should remember the low wage earner who works in the retail industry that serve them. Well, who will cater to the Kelowna wealthy when all these so called lower class wage earners can no longer afford to reside in Kelowna. It has also become habit for some Kelowna landlords to jump loopholes and evict tenants because they want to update a unit and increase the rent. The trick they use to get past the legal way according to the tenants acts is merely just to threaten, harass a tenant, plant false accusations against a tenant just to give them an illegal thirty day notice to get out rather than giving them the proper three month notice and last month rent free. One can read a lot about tenant horror stories but the reverse is also very true. Kelowna has become a wanna be Vancouver. Real estate developers are in the planning of erecting many high rise buildings. Kelowna will one day no longer have a nice lake view setting and calm serene parks. It will become a huge, ugly, cemented landscape filled with towering building eyesores, elite type expensive stores, pricey high end restaurants and events and activities designed for those with loaded wallets. Kelowna is a cliquey city now but this will worsen over time. Even Kelowna's heritage newspaper sold itself out so another huge building can be erected on the corner street, downtown Kelowna. My view is that Kelowna does not have enough land mass to include all these New York like structure fixings and the ability to sustain hundreds of thousands of people in such an already overcrowded area. In the end, I'm glad that I will not have to further witness anymore of this type of pompous baloney.