Salmon Arm included re...."Kelowna just keeps on growing"

Steve Threndyle and his family picked the right time to move to Kelowna.

When they got there five years ago, you could -- and they did -- buy a big, elegant house in a leafy neighbourhood half a block from Okanagan Lake.

They paid a little over $200,000, Threndyle said Tuesday.


"It's worth $500,000 now, and it could be worth $600,000 by the end of summer. It just keeps going up and up."

The boom is being fuelled not only by migrants from Vancouver, but also from Calgary, which has long had a powerful relationship with the Okanagan, its lakes and its mild climate.

Some are retiring or semi-retiring in Kelowna, some are raising kids in a smaller, gentler place, some are living in paradise while working in places like Fort McMurray, mining Alberta's oil-sands.

The upshot is that Kelowna is the fifth-fastest growing metropolitan area in Canada, with a population of 126,384, up 8.3 per cent since the last census. The only other B.C. city to make the top 10 is Abbotsford, in ninth place.

Demographics expert Andrew Ramlo of Vancouver's Urban Futures Institute said he can't be certain who's moving to Kelowna. Demographic breakdowns of the new census won't be out until June.

But it's likely both retirees and younger people looking for job opportunities are moving there as it becomes the province's third largest metropolitan region, after the Lower Mainland and the Victoria area, Ramlo said.

And it's not just Kelowna and its immediate surroundings. Threndyle said the whole Okanagan Valley from Osoyoos to Salmon Arm is going through frantic growth. Ramlo added that Kelowna is becoming a gateway to the rest of B.C. from the Lower Mainland.

There's even a crowded commuter flight from Kelowna to Seattle every Monday morning from the recently expanded Kelowna airport, Threndyle said. A small high-tech industry is starting to flower in Kelowna, and some people are starting to call it -- what else? -- Silicon Vineyard.

But not everything's rosy. There are not a lot of high-paying industrial jobs in Kelowna since the Western Star truck manufacturing plant moved to Portland a few years ago and Telus laid off a lot of people.

There's an atmosphere of overheated development, especially in the smaller nearby centres like West Bank.

"There are former tent and trailer parks on the water that have now converted to multimillion-dollar condo projects and that sort of thing," Threndyle said. "You can drive up and down the valley from Osoyoos all the way to Salmon Arm and there are billboards everywhere for new condo developments."

Traffic is bad, and services are not keeping up with growth. There's a piece of downtown Kelowna near the lake that is dominated by panhandlers and drug dealing, and some businesses are moving out to the malls. In some parts of the valley there appears to be little development control, and big-box stores are popping up along the scenic highways.

There's even some urban angst that things will get worse: the local paper carried a headline Tuesday warning that Kelowna may be overrun by Vancouver's homeless when they are pushed out for the 2010 Winter Games

The Interior town is the fifth-fastest growing metropolitan area in Canada. Abbotsford's Number 9.

(prepared by William Boei, Vancouver Sun)

URBAN AREAS
Canada's urban areas, listed by speed of growth since 2001

Brantford 124,607 30.60%
Sherbrooke 186,952 17.70%
Barrie 177,061 16.10%
Peterborough 116,570 12.10%
Calgary 1,079,310 11.90%
Oshawa 330,594 10.40%
Edmonton 1,034,945 9.40%
Kelowna 162,276 9.00%
Toronto 5,113,149 8.40%
Kitchener 451,235 8.20%
Guelph 127,009 7.60%
Abbotsford 159,020 7.30%
Moncton 126,424 6.90%
Vancouver 2,116,581 6.10%
Ottawa/Gatineau 1,130,761 5.90%
Montreal 3,635,571 5.80%
Victoria 330,088 5.50%
London 457,720 5.50%
Windsor 323,342 4.80%
Quebec 715,515 4.60%
St. John's 181,113 4.50%
Hamilton 692,911 4.40%
Halifax 372,858 3.70%
Kingston 152,358 3.60%
Saskatoon 233,923 3.40%
St. Catharines - Niagara 390,317 3.40%
Winnipeg 694,668 3.40%
Trois-Rivieres 141,529 2.80%
Greater Sudbury 158,258 1.70%
Regina 194,971 1.10%
Thunder Bay 122,907 0.70%
Saint John 122,389 -0.20%
Saguenay 151,643 -2.20%

(Source: Statistics Canada, CanWest News Service)