“Why is there affordable housing being built in Chilliwack and Mission but not in Abbotsford?” was the question posed to me by someone who had recently moved from working on a mental health team in Chilliwack to a mental health team in Abbotsford.
The answer to the question is simple and straightforward – Abbotsford City Council.
While Abbotsford City Council has been paying lip service to the lamentable lack of affordable housing, hiring social planners and forming advisory committees – City Councils in Chilliwack and Mission have been supporting and standing behind supportive affordable housing projects in their cities.
As a result Abbotsford has ended up with growing homelessness and affordable housing problem building into a crisis; Chilliwack and Mission meanwhile have been plugging away at actions that result in affordable housing projects getting built in their cities.
‘No money!’ cries city council. ‘Here is $11 million for construction and $650,000 per year for staffing and support services, heck double that and make it two projects’ says the province.
No poverty excuse? No problem equivocate – look for a more suitable location for the Emerson project.
After the recent exercise of spinelessness by Abbotsford City Council on abandoning the densification called for by their own Official City Plan, what do you think the odds are they will find the backbone to vote for the rezoning needed for the Clearbrook Road to be built?
No doubt a suitable location for these provincially funded housing projects will be found. Unfortunately, based on recent history, the locations will most likely be in Chilliwack or Mission.
It is looking more and more as if the best chance to see affordable housing in Abbotsford will be after the 2010 Olympics when citizens can stand along Highway 1 and watch as some of the units that had housed athletes at the winter games past through Abbotsford on their way to Chilliwack. Where, once reassembled, they will add to Chilliwack’s growing stock of affordable housing.
Increasing numbers of people, fallout from the economic meltdown, are falling through our inadequate social safety net, landing on the streets and accelerating the increase in the numbers of people without housing and homeless.
Abbotsford city council has, with its careless disregard for the consequences of its failure to act and provide leadership, allowed this problem to continue to grow to the point of crises.
Council must stop making excuses, find some backbone, provide leadership and actually take an action (action as in something other than words or paper shuffling) that results in actual shovels in the ground on affordable housing projects.