But during the past 10 years, with a powerful real estate boom driving development that's spreading as fast and, in some opinions, as indiscriminately and harmfully as the Okanagan Mountain wildfire of 2003, the fear is that paradise is rapidly being lost.
And increasingly, with shocking headlines about brazen drug-gang killings, the worst domestic violence statistics in B.C. and the worst drunk-driving figures in the country, fear of innocent lives lost is the new, more ugly reality in lovely Kelowna.
To fellow diners in a cafe outside the Delta Grand hotel, with their muscles and tattoos, Jon Bacon and his pals, including Hells Angel Larry Amero and an Independent Soldier plus the pretty, young niece of a Fraser Valley Hells Angel, were perhaps gaudy, but not too conspicuous. Since the Hells Angels expanded their presence in town starting in 2003, thugs out and about and cruising the streets and waterways of Kelowna in gleaming toys were to be expected.
But on Aug. 14, 2011, a typical lazy, sunny day downtown, Kelowna got its wake-up call when 30-year-old Bacon was gunned down in a white Porsche Cayenne in front of stunned vacationers.
The latest drug murders to shock the community, this time in West Kelowna, include an apparently innocent 30-year-old mother, Tiffany Goruk. She and Jeremy Daniel Snow, 33, were found dead Monday in a black SUV outside a high-end condo complex. Snow was a convicted drug smuggler who served time in a U.S. prison for his part in a high-profile ring.
Sgt. Ghalib Bhayani of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit says several factors led to the influx of gangsters during the past few years, including the push of enforcement in the Lower Mainland, and the pull of attractive property and fast money on Okanagan Lake. Police know, for example, that gangsters and their extended families have bought up expensive lake properties recently, taking advantage of a post-2008 real estate market dip.
Right now, the Hells Angels are dominant, with "support clubs" such as the Throttle Lockers and the King Pin Crew. The Rock Machine, a biker gang known for bloody battles with the Hells Angels in Quebec, was seen in town during the past six months but may have been pressured out by the Hells Angels recently. To an extant, Lower Mainland gangs, including the United Nations and Independent Soldiers, are present in Kelowna, as well as less organized street-level players.
Bhayani said he can't comment on the Bacon investigation, which is still open. He points to recent police successes, such as charges against several Throttle Lockers members in the 2011 murder of a man named Dain Phillips, as signs of success.
"At one point, the gangs believed they were under the radar and untouchable, and that's why we've moved up there too," Bhayani said.
Simon Fraser University criminologist Rob Gordon says a crackdown on grow-ops and gangs in the Lower Mainland displaced gangs into the Interior, so logically, as the third-largest urban area in B.C., the Kelowna district has become a major crime hub.
The pot growing in remote Okanagan forests and increasing use of drug routes in southeastern B.C., such as the Nelson corridor that the recently murdered Jeremy Daniel Snow used to access the U.S. market, make Kelowna a key drug route nexus.
"Quite clearly, what used to be a sleepy Okanagan town that had a swelling population in the summer has changed into a permanent city, with all the crime problems you would expect," Gordon said.
For University of B.C. population geography Prof. Carlos Teixeira, it's clear that local citizens are afraid of increasingly visible violent criminals in Kelowna and are worried about the city's growing reputation as a crime capital. These are common topics of discussion in the UBC Okanagan campus community, although studies on the reasons why violent crime statistics have spiked haven't been done, says Teixeira.
But it's reasonable to suppose "a cocktail of factors," including rapid population growth, a transient population that is drawn to Kelowna's mild climate and a public sector that is struggling to catch up, are likely causes behind the growing criminality, Teixeira concludes.
In Teixeira's classes, students talk about the steep growth curve that Kelowna has seen: from a sleepy rural town 100 years ago to a retirement community of 20,000 in 1970, to the fourth-fastest growing city in Canada in 2012, with a current estimated population of about 130,000. Population roughly doubles in the summer when recreation on Lake Okanagan ramps up, which makes the region difficult to police.
Teixeira says local planners must get ahead of the population growth trend and address social problems stemming from a lack of skilled and non-skilled jobs for youth, inadequate public transit and economic imbalances caused by Kelowna's exorbitantly priced housing benchmark, which is the fourth-most expensive in Canada.
Teixeira uses colourful terms such as "pepperoni pizza development" to describe the haphazard manner in which housing is splattered around the region, with little or no unifying thought.
"We need the local government to pay attention: Are we growing too fast. Where are we going?" Teixeira said.
Gordon Price, one of B.C.'s leading city experts and a former Vancouver councillor, remembers well his charming childhood trips to Kelowna in the 1950s. There was the city park, the fruit stands, a good bustle on Bernard Avenue and the Fintry Queen car ferry in the harbour. Ironically, the iconic Fintry Queen just got the boot, to make way for a $5-million private wharf development.
Price says when the municipal government asked him to come to Kelowna to help put through an anchor mixed-use development on Bernard about 20 years ago, he was stunned by the disjointed and ugly patchwork of parking lots and strip malls. The development failed, with complaints against building height and density.
"I thought Nanaimo would be the worst example of a city being 'malled' to death until I went back and saw what happened in Kelowna," Price said. "And now from what I've seen in West Kelowna, it is even worse. It's bad development on steroids."
Price says Kelowna politicians seem to have lacked the will and vision to guide smart development growth, but there is still hope.
Basically, Kelowna needs the type of turnaround that Mayor Dianne Watts and her council have started in Central Surrey. Focus on increasing transit and public infrastructure investment downtown and give developers a vision - more walkable, more dense, buildings more linked in purpose - that they can buy into.
"You have huge potential in Kelowna. There is a reason people go there. Just stop making bad stuff."
Kelowna Mayor Walter Gray, a longtime municipal leader who was recently voted back into office, acknowledges some missteps in Kelowna, but downplays crime fears.
"I don't get the sense that we have a population that is scared for their lives," Gray said, noting this week's double murder was in West Kelowna. "The Jon Bacon killing could have happened in Sicamous as much as Kelowna. He was in Kelowna because bad guys like holidays, too."
Gray said Kelowna has upped its police force by 12 members, and with a crime reduction strategy getting underway in 2013, he believes citizens are confident that the dubious crime-capital statistics Kelowna has been tagged with in recent years will soon fade away.
When it comes to criticisms against misguided development in Kelowna, Gray points out that his council is trying to turn the city around, with plans that echo many of the urban-design successes for which the City of Vancouver is known. Bernard Avenue is undergoing a $17-million makeover that will reduce automobile traffic and "make it a people place," Gray said.
Public transit, biking and walking routes are the new focus, and Kelowna is seeking to foster new high-tech startups, build on its wine, food and recreation destination brand, and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by about 30 per cent by 2020.
If that sounds like a Vancouver of the Interior, well, that's sort of the idea.
"We want to be the most desirable mid-size city in North America," Gray said, of his new vision for Kelowna.
Back in his Vancouver office, Gordon Price is asked to consider the good and the bad in Kelowna, and to prescribe an urban-planning remedy that could help the underperforming city live up to the beauty of its natural surroundings. On his computer, he opens up a Google Earth satellite map and literally gasps, taking in all the potential land value and tax-base being wasted in car parks.
It's exactly like Joni Mitchell said. They paved paradise to put up a parking lot.
"Those lots just suck the life away. They need to fill that in with transit-oriented development," he said. "They've had some good ideas that lacked momentum, and they have a good economy. The important thing is to have the long-term vision and commitment."
