South Surrey's Seniors Built This Community. Now They Can't Afford to Stay in It.
The people who raised their families here, who paid into this community for decades, are being squeezed out by a combination of rising costs, inadequate seniors housing, and a care system that was not built for the population it now has to serve.
Margaret has lived in South Surrey for thirty-four years. She raised three children here. She watched the area grow from a quiet rural corner of the Lower Mainland into the dense, traffic-heavy suburb it has become. She is seventy-one. Her husband passed two years ago. And the house that was their home for three decades is no longer manageable alone.
She is on three waitlists for assisted living. The shortest estimated wait is fourteen months. The market-rate options she can afford — given the modest proceeds from downsizing a home whose value increased faster than anyone expected — are forty-five minutes away in communities she has no connection to.
Margaret's situation is not unusual. It is the situation for a significant and growing number of South Surrey's older residents, who are discovering that a region that built enormous quantities of single-family housing and luxury condos did not build a corresponding supply of appropriate, affordable housing for the people who will inevitably need it as they age.
The math was always going to produce this outcome. South Surrey's population surge of the 1990s and 2000s created a large cohort of residents who are now entering the phase of life where housing needs change significantly. The planning decisions of those decades did not adequately account for what those residents would need thirty years later.
Now they need it. And it is not there.
There is no quick fix for a housing pipeline that takes years to develop, permit, and build. But there is an urgent case for treating seniors housing as critical infrastructure — not an optional amenity to be provided when the market finds it profitable, but a necessity to be planned and funded with the same seriousness as roads and schools.
The people who built South Surrey deserve to age in it. Right now, the system is telling many of them they cannot.
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