What am I actually going to do? I was afraid you wouldn’t ask…
As Kelowna grows, it should get easier to live here.
Right now, property tax applies to both the land underneath Kelowna and the things we build on it. That means we tax someone for improving their property while relatively rewarding someone who sits on valuable, underused land.
B.C. cities used to have another option: tax land and improvements at different rates. By 1914, roughly two-thirds of B.C. municipalities used forms of land-value taxation. Today, provincial law doesn't give Kelowna that choice.
I think it should. I want Kelowna to join other B.C. municipalities and the UBCM in pushing the Province for the ability to shift more of our tax burden onto land and less onto the things people build on it.
I want Kelowna to tax land more and buildings less.
Growth should pay for growth.
Kelowna is growing rapidly. That growth creates enormous value, especially when City decisions allow land to be developed more intensively.
Some of that value should come back to the community that created it.
When new development requires roads, parks, utilities, transit and other infrastructure, existing residents shouldn't automatically be left with the bill. And when a zoning decision substantially increases the value of private land, I want to understand how much of that value we're capturing for the public.
Growth should pay for growth, and growth should leave Kelowna wealthier than it found it.
Build co-op housing at a scale that actually matters.
What would it take to build 1,000 co-op homes in Kelowna?
Kelowna has some co-op housing, but I want to see a lot more.
Co-ops offer something the private housing market can't guarantee: homes that can remain affordable permanently rather than becoming affordable for ten years and then returning to market rates. And with enough of them, they help the entire market stay more affordable.
I want to investigate what it would actually take for Kelowna, working with senior governments, non-profits and co-op organizations, to create substantially more new co-op homes.
Transit should be good enough to replace a car.
The goal of transit shouldn't be to technically have transit. It should be to make owning a car optional for more people.
For a household that can go from two cars to one, better transit isn't just transportation infrastructure. It's affordability infrastructure.
As Kelowna grows, I want us to judge transit by a much more practical question:
Can this system actually replace a car?
That means frequency, reliability, useful routes and connections to the places people actually need to go.
People need a path out of homelessness. Everyone else needs to feel safe now.
I don't think those ideas conflict.
Someone living on the street deserves a realistic path toward housing, treatment, healthcare and stability. A business owner also shouldn't have to accept repeated theft, vandalism or open drug use outside their business while we wait for those long-term systems to work.
Kelowna already has more infrastructure addressing this than I understood when I started investigating it: housing programs, outreach coordination, RCMP, Bylaw, shelters, transitional housing and a Community Safety strategy.
So my question has changed.
Where is the system still breaking down? What problems can the City actually solve? What requires the Province? What can we do immediately without simply moving disorder from one neighborhood to another?
That's what I'm investigating now.