Competition will create better price choices

As printed in Letters to the Editor June 28, 2022 Penticton Herald

I strongly encourage all the residents business owners to go to: shapeyourcitypenticton.ca/1050-spiller-road and make your voices and opinions heard. Your comments will be incorporated into to development as it gets built.

I am curious if any local media took in the Shape Your City open house this past Saturday for the 1050 Spiller Road proposal. If they did, they would have seen very few people (approximately 30 based on my count) seem to be concerned about this proposal.

The neighbourhood surrounding the proposed Canadian Horizons development on Spiller Road supports the original development proposal for a master planned, family orientated, mix of housing.

There is a growing number of people in the community who have educated themselves to the benefits of this development and support it in its original form, maximizing density. Check for yourselves.

Once Wiltse is built out, all remaining land, (with the exception of the Spiller Road block) that could be developed within municipal boundaries is steep (grades of 20% or more) which will dictate large lots, and multi-million-dollar homes, if it is to be developed at all.

The Spiller Road block is the only remaining block of land suitable for development to allow for smaller lots and more reasonably priced homes. The buyers of these homes will come, for the most part, from older homes in Penticton, as they did at Sendero.

In the current real estate market, there is no competition to keep a lid on pricing in Penticton.

City Council could do a major good for the entire area by approving the Canadian Horizons proposal as a competing project to the Wiltse development so buyers could have a price choice. Competition would assure competitive home prices for the next five to 10 years. It would also allow a local move-up market like Sendero rather than relying on people from Lower Mainland to buy.

Voters have already spoken and elected our council to follow the OCP. Council did the work plan, the OCP, now they need to follow it.

Developable land is a sacred resource we must use wisely. The community, staff and successive councils have done the background work to determine and identify these lands as future development.

Opposition and delay similar to what has occurred with subsequent proposals for these lands is exactly what Minister Eby and the province is talking about with NIMBY-ism preventing much needed housing supply coming to the market for people wanting to call Penticton home.

I strongly encourage all the residents business owners to go to: shapeyourcitypenticton.ca/1050-spiller-road and make your voices and opinions heard. Your comments will be incorporated into to development as it gets built.

Gil Szabo

Penticton