Displaced downtown residents being moved again

KELOWNA — Displaced residents of a damaged building next to the UBCO construction site in downtown Kelowna will spend the next several months living at Okanagan College.

The 85 residents can move into the top three floors of a new student housing complex at the college’s KLO Road campus.

The most recent analysis of Hadgraft-Wilson Place, where cracks are evident throughout the six-storey building, is that the evacuated residents won’t be able to return for several months.

Since the early April evacuation, the building’s residents - most but not all of whom have intellectual impairments have been living at a variety of motels around Kelowna.

Bringing them all together again in one location should help restore their social and support networks, officials say.

“Our residents have become a tight-knit community in the past year and this opportunity allows them to maintain the support of their friends and neighbours,” Charisse Daley, executive director of the Pathways Ability Society, which owns and manages Hadgraft-Wilson Place, said in a Friday release.

“Providing some stability about their next few months and having the amenities of homes will hopefully make things easier while they wait for the remediation of our building and next steps,” Daley

said.

Lodging the evacuees in the campus building is said to have arisen through co-operative efforts of the city and the college.

“In this situation, we were able to respond to the call and come together as a team to get our new student housing building ready for the Pathways community to have access to the space now, when they need it,” college president Neil Fassina said.

“City staff have been working diligently alongside Pathways, BC Housing, and local developers to find options and alternatives for the residents, who have experienced so much during this trying time,” Mayor Tom Dyas said. “We want to ensure this process continues to be handled with sensitivity, safety, and compassion.”

Pathways and other agencies will work to find longer-term solutions for the evacuees starting in mid-August, once the lease with the college ends.

At the new campus building, there is a mix of individual rooms and common spaces, as well as some suites, which will be matched to the evacuees based on their unique needs.

Hadgraft-Wilson Place opened in June 2023, just as the massive excavation at the UBCO construction site at 550 Doyle Ave was getting underway. Vibrations from the big dig are thought to have led to soil shifting that has caused cracks in nearby buildings, though UBCO has not directly acknowledged its construction project is to blame.