The Editor,
Re. “Big plans in works for Cottonwood Park” (The Tri-City News, July 12) and “Has your mayor been hanging around for too long?” (Opinion, The Tri-City News, July 14).
Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart never mentions that the expansion of Cottonwood Park can be carried out only after 200 affordable rental apartments now on the site have been razed.
Similarly, at the three Burquitlam-Lougheed Neighbourhood Plan public consultation sessions, a check with other attendees revealed none were aware of this fact nor did any of the many colourful presentation posters and maps of the site give any clues. To casual attendees, who might well have favoured this park expansion, it looked as if this wonderful looking amenity was to be created on bare land.
But the truth is that the partnership with the YMCA and Concert Properties to realize this park expansion also has a human cost for the 200 families that have already begun to be displaced. In addition, their perfectly livable, family-oriented rental apartments will also be permanently lost from the city’s affordable rental housing stock — at the time of the worst rental affordability crisis ever.
Even if the partnership includes a plan for Concert to build new rental replacement apartments in Burquitlam Park, along with a new YMCA pool complex, by 2021, do you start building up your affordable rental stock by destroying 200 of your most affordable units first?
This so-called “innovative” deal, which also wrecks space in one park to create about an equal amount of additional space in another, should be reconsidered. And since municipal elections are to be held in 2018, this should be an election issue.
On the one hand, we have a vision of a futuristic, clean, high-tech, gleaming city of towers, large parks and amenities for the new property owners and investor-buyers; on the other, a growing tidal wave of dispossessed renters, forced to move on, with nowhere to go.
As Mike Klassen in his opinion piece observes regarding the mayor of Burnaby: “His floundering explanation for why he continues to allow low-income apartments to be razed while 45-storey, high-end condo buildings replace them should be a flag to voters that it is time for a change.” The same thing is going on here in Coquitlam — and it must stop.
Can density and amenity issues not be resolved without drastic consequences for the less affluent occupying or desperately seeking low-cost housing?
Felix Thijssen, Coquitlam
