Letter to the editor
In 1968 I lived on ‘unlivable’ wages in Banff, then mostly a regular town. Today in Banff, there are many wealthy out of town residences and revolving transient workers living four-plus to a bedroom. No community quality spirit remains; it is sterile.
Canmore where I lived with 3,000 people has followed that pattern and spirit has dimmed to a pale shadow. Invermere now has one leg over the same cliff.
Why would Invermere not heed those towns’ dysfunctional experiences? Planning expertise with foresight could have limited Invermere in-town house purchasers to full-time locals employed here [it’s been done elsewhere]. Instead a new town bylaw encourages more wealthy out of towners to grab in-town second homes, outbidding locals and often evicting renters. Within Invermere a third of housing is now owned by visitors and a lot of them are converting to rental motels, greatly diminishing the availability of locals’ housing. This unhealthy situation fuelled by wealth is hurting and not benefitting 99 per cent of Invermere’s locals.
High school students are the only employees available for some local businesses now. Local young adults without wealthy families must stay with parents, compete for a diminishing very few rentals, or be forced to say goodbye. Our community quality is predictably disappearing rapidly.
We nicknamed Banff, ‘where selfish greed meets opportunity’. This is becoming applicable to Invermere. Our administrators’ motive is baffling, while the wealthy are now in gobble mode. Aristotle’s rules of logic do say: if you permit stupid things to happen, you’ll get stupid consequences. With wisdom this did not have to be inevitable. Spirit is being sacrificed and Invermere is fading quickly to anonymity.
Capitalistic greed has no empathy or conscience.
Bill Ark, Invermere
