Are you kidding? When did $300,000 become affordable housing? Let’s crunch some numbers since clearly Oliver Heights cannot.

At a $311,000 mortgage with $30,000 down payment and a fixed 10-year term interest rate of 6.09 per cent you are looking at $2,231 a month in mortgage payments. If you go to 30 years that payment only drops to just over $1,800 a month. Let’s put some perspective on this. I make just over $19 an hour. At 160 hours a month that works out to about $3,040 a month before taxes. Now we take away taxes, EI, and CPP, what is left is about $2,400 a month after taxes.

I want to buy a house as a first time home buyer. So based on the above paragraph I have $169 left over to buy food at $250 a month, put gas in my car at $100–200 a month, pay for home owners insurance at $100-$200 a month, content insurance ($100–$200 a month), phone at $40, Internet $80–$140, possibly child care if I have a child at $1,000 a month, utilities $100–$200 a month, and $200 a month for yearly land taxes. Add the average of all of those together and you arrive at $2,200 a month more to own a house. This does not include any fixes or repair or improvements you may need to do to your house as well. So the cost of buying your nice new home has now jumped to over $4,000 a month. So each month, if I wanted to buy a house I would be over $2,000 a month in debt. How is this low income housing?

Seventy per cent of average working people, waiters, cooks, support workers, care aids, fast food workers, orchard workers, retail workers, hotel staff and gas attendants don’t even come close to making what I do. They make up the majority or the workforce in almost any community. Tell me how are they going to be able to afford this “affordable housing?” This is an absolute slap in the face to try and call this low to medium affordable housing.

I think it’s absolutely insulting for any developer or council to drag this out as an affordable option for the average person or family. Perehudoff and Beyer should really do some fact checking into what the new financial reality is for the average working person or family in the Okanagan.

There are some key phrases in this to be noted: “Accommodate Area 27 vehicle owners.” This then is not geared toward low income at all. No one at Area 27 as a car owner will ever be classified as low income. That is a hard fact that will not change. So if these new homes are even in part geared towards them, then do you think they will want to be next to the family that can’t afford the same level of living as they do?

The hard truth is they will not be paying to live next to actual low income housing. Why are there strata fees for this housing anyway? What possible benefit could that be to homeowners there, other then yet another additional cost to an already unaffordable and unrealistic promise by this and similar developers?

Shawn Hathaway, Oliver