Canada Day festivities in Riverside Park will be a little different this year without the excitement of the grand prize draw in the Rotary Club of Guelph’s Dream Lottery. Let’s hope this lottery can indeed return next year, as is the aim of Rotary members. In the meantime, it will be missed.
It certainly says something about the state of Guelph’s housing market that the club has been hitting a wall in terms of finding a “dream home” it can buy to use as a lottery prize, at a price that makes sense for the club. Heading out to the south end to see the latest Rotary “dream home” on a partly developed street used to be an anticipated spring outing for a lot of people. The house generally had compelling features and decorating that were the stuff of daydreams about winning it.
Now the inventory of housing and of single-detached lots is so low in Guelph, a Rotary official says, that finding a dream home to use as a prize has become an elusive dream even for the Rotary club, with all its great connections in the business community.
We wish the Rotary club good luck in its consideration of something other than a freestanding house to use as a grand prize in 2014. The times, they are indeed changing!