Editor:
This is in response to Ray Bradford’s March 5, 2013, letter regarding the redevelopment of the Seaside Manufactured Home Park.
No, it does not make any sense that a manufactured home park is removed in order to replace it with another manufactured home park.
In essence, what is happening is that a manufactured home park is being replaced with a new housing subdivision.
The eviction of the previous residents from the Seaside MHP may have been legal, strictly speaking; however, the current owners and developers have been very aggressive in getting what they want.
The Cowichan Valley Regional District (CVRD) has done nothing but allow and encourage this situation.
The CVRD could have prevented the current development but chose not to, based on an undisclosed in-house legal definition of the issues.
The CVRD could have gone to court to challenge some of the rules and regulations. By their own admission, they chose not to engage in a legal battle. This is in the minutes of the Electoral Area Services Committee for anyone interested in looking it up on the CVRD website.
Indeed, the CVRD is now entertaining an application from the developers for a variance to remove some of the amenities that define a manufactured home park.
If questioned, our experience is that the CVRD is going to say it did everything correctly.
The area directors are choosing to ignore the fact that people, along with their homes, were forcibly, though legally, removed from a property.
They are choosing to encourage the replacement of these homes with up-market housing. By making these decisions, the CVRD is showing that it has no interest whatsoever in the everyday person’s housing situation.
Megan Terepocki
Nanaimo
