Senior left homeless by fire won’t have to live on street
Generous couple on Westside offers Kelowna man room in their house, rent free
AKelowna man left homeless by a fire at a motel has found a new place to live. And, thanks to the generosity of his new landlords, Michael Sieux isn’t having to pay rent for his new accommodation.
A Westside couple offered Sieux a room in their house after reading of his difficulty in finding a new apartment after a fire earlier this month at the Walnut Grove motel on Truswell Road in Kelowna.
“This kind couple contacted me after reading about Michael’s story,” Sieux’s friend, Kerry Flynn, said Sunday. “They were very eager to help, and they’re not even asking him for rent for as long as he stays with them.”
Another man intends to add a bathroom to his small room so Sieux can move in with him, in about a month’s time.
Several people called Flynn, whose phone number was included in a story last Thursday about Sieux’s problem in finding an affordable place to live. The July 8 fire started at the nearby Water’s Edge condominium development, destroying an under-construction fivestorey building.
Sieux, who’d lived at the motel for 13 years, paying $600 a month in rent, was out buying groceries at the time of the fire. He returned to find he was homeless and spent the last few weeks trying unsuccessfully to find a place he could afford.
The Canadian Red Cross put Sieux up at a motel for about two weeks, but that came to an end last Thursday. Sieux is a 68-year-old who gets by with pension cheques totalling $1,350 a month.
Most of the places he looked at, Sieux said, rented for at least $1,000 a month.
The city’s biggest provider of lowincome seniors housing, the Society of Hope, says demand is so great that the organization has temporarily stopped accepting applications.