Dear Editor,
What will it take for governments to understand that subsidized housing is the number one need in this country? We can call it what we like, affordable or a voice calling in the wilderness, but, what we need to do is to wake-up before the magnitude overwhelms us with inability to respond and resolve the problem.
Affordable what does it mean in housing low-income households? Developers love to use this terminology because they can set the rules and price of the rental units to what they deem is affordable. Some use the term “below market price” but is it affordable to the people that are in desperate need of housing or rental units? In reality for seniors and low-income earners and for people on the street this terminology that is being applied for loans or grants from governments on all levels for new affordable housing should be applied with the words income based subsidized housing.
The meaning for a nation that is being built must mean more then “below market price,” because quite frankly it means very little for the people who are in need. Rent is an issue as is food price, as is the ability to live and provide for ourselves within our means when the bubble we live in has been broken, affordable is neither a word of comfort nor a solution if its unattainable because the living costs are not within our means.
No one, including governments, are blind to what is going on out there and for the need of subsidized, income based housing which is structured on income, unless, governments don’t give a hoot that people can no longer are able to afford to pay the rent and to be a member of this society.
Pensioners and low-income people and the working poor are struggling with the cost of living, and homelessness is a reality that continues to invite many of Canada’s victims of rising costs to our concrete streets, because, Canada has become a nation that houses food banks and people who are in need of housing.
Housing, as with all meaningful comforts of life, is not “below market price”, but holds much more value then these abstract concepts. Life itself has a price to its value, because the value is what we give to it in our everyday lives.
Governments need to have a value in its vocabulary concerning the needs of housing, and subsidized housing is one of the greatest needs now, not the vague terminology of “affordable housing” which can mean a dollar less then market prices.
The country is in the loan of the century.
Governments and banks need to grant loans or subsidies to developers who actually get people off the street, prevent people from being the next homeless person, and last but not least, recognizing it has become a necessity to house people based on their income, and that subsidized housing is prominently the reality to affordability.
We as a nation are a crowding of many levels of income with varying abilities to house our needs, to feed ourselves and to care for ourselves. Our ability to task this daily structure in our lives has become a fault.
Governments need value and its value is in its people to be able to not only to live their lives with a purpose and with meaningful goals, but with the ability to just exist without the words, “how can we exist?”
Cran Campbell, Langley City
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