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Illegal sometimes

THIS has been a sad week for two households in the City of North Vancouver. Before long, the city will have in hand an injunction from the B.C. Supreme Court ordering them to leave their homes.

THIS has been a sad week for two households in the City of North Vancouver. Before long, the city will have in hand an injunction from the B.C. Supreme Court ordering them to leave their homes.

It is certain that they will either have to hand over more of their monthly income to put new roofs over their heads, or, like so many, simply abandon the North Shore.

There's enough blame to go around for this sorry episode. The suites are illegal, and city staff suspect they don't meet fire-code requirements. The landlord must answer for this. Renting firetraps is gambling with people's lives.

The city isn't blameless either. Although the landlord played a long, cynical delaying game, collecting rent all the while, the city didn't do enough to find a solution that kept these people in their homes.

Most of all this illustrates the basic contradiction in the city policy of enforcement only on complaint. We certainly don't want the city to be barging into every home in search of illegal suites. But the result of looking the other way is to lure people into inexpensive shelter and then turf them back out.

The city is currently trying to figure out how to support rental housing. It has gone to great lengths to help support low-cost housing for seniors and for people living with disabilities. This is commendable. But there remains a large number of citizens who are able to live in the city and elsewhere on the North Shore only because their homes are illegal - and uninspected.

This needs to be fixed.