Affordable Housing for Rich People

by Sue Stroud

Editor; I just picked up my Saturday Times-Colonist to find the most ignorant ad I have ever seen staring me in the face from page F5. The full page ad is titled "Introducing Affordable Housing for Rich People."

 

 

 

Did no one at the TC recognize that this ad reads like the famous phrases "let them it cake" and "I'm all right Jack"? Are there no standards of decency against which ads are measured? The rich are acknowledged by the advertiser, Aquattro homes, as being so ignorant and selfish that they might find "affordable housing for rich people" to be an attractive, maybe even funny catch line.

I work for an affordable housing agency and handle heartbreaking calls every day from mothers trying to keep their children from being taken away from them by ex-spouses or the Ministry because, often through no fault of their own, they lack safe affordable housing.

 

There are now thousands of families on the waiting lists for subsidized housing in BC. No new affordable housing for families has been built since Gordon Campbell and his heartless Liberals came to power nearly 6 and a half years ago.

Poor families are living in tents in our parks, broken down trailers and cars in friends backyards and in horrible overcrowded conditions where there are sometimes as many as 12 people living in a 2 bedroom home to make ends meet.

 

Legal Aid has been destroyed so single parents can no longer fight back against ex-spouses or the Ministry. Waiting lists for legal aid are 8 or 9 months long.

 

Daycare has been destroyed so parents can't work without leaving children unattended. Children can't be registered for school if the parents have no fixed address.

 

Work has been destroyed with HEU pay rollbacks, the transfer of jobs offshore through NAFTA and other undemocratic trade deals and through BC government job cuts which have broken up some families, caused others to lose their homes and sell off their belongings and left formerly middle class families struggling to keep hearth and home together.

The result is an ever increasing, but invisible homelessness crisis which escalates health costs, policing costs, education costs and leaves resentful people where there once were contributing members of society.

 

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