To the editor:
It is rather obvious that the (Kelowna city) council supporters of the proposed duo highrise Monaco project at Doyle and Ellis are either suffering from myopic vision or there is a lot of money being grabbed under the table.
I used to live in Fresno, California for a time, and watched the council there destroy that city with unnecessary highrises and misguided ideas about developing downtown. Their efforts destroyed Fresno as a liveable municipality. Fresno downtown became the home of denizens and crime has become rampant. Nobody I know will even go there anymore. The centre is dead.
Now I see the same mistakes being made here in Kelowna.
We all know that (Mayor) Walter Gray’s council is partial to developers, but in an era where people cannot even sell their condos, this manic mania for almost unbridled development along the lakeshore and the downtown vicinity is going to cost this town dearly.
Kelowna is a resort community, but the prettiness of downtown and those wonderful views of the lake and mountains will quickly be lost by canyons of highrises, enclosing an awkward pedestrian walkway where there is very limited parking.
We will have to contend with a mini-Vancouver and all its accompanying problems in the years ahead all because some greedy and misinformed council members and developers hurried to destroy a coveted jewel that once shone brightly in the firmament of beautiful Canadian lake resorts.
What a shame.
Laurence D. M. Marshall,
Kelowna
