May 9, 2014
Board of Directors – Metro Vancouver
Re: Delta’s Application to Move Growth Boundary for Southlands Project
Mr. Chairman, members of the Board:
My name is Mark Holland and I want to encourage you to approve Delta’s application to move the growth boundary to accommodate the Southlands project.
My letter to you is based on my experience –as the past Manager of the Sustainability Office in the City of Vancouver, as a community and regional planner, as a food systems consultant, and now as a private sector developer, working primarily in the Okanagan Valley where we are dealing with the interface of farmland and development every day.
There are several reasons why I believe this application has merit – both based on remedying a poor decision from the past, and more importantly, preparing the region for the future.
Remedying the decision to remove the land from the ALR
Many years ago, the then-named Spettifore Lands were, in my opinion, released from the ALR in error. However, it was taken out of the ALR and is now a real estate asset that needs to be treated respectfully.
While technically, the entire site could be simply put into the ALR by the municipality that would be draconian and nigh unto expropriation, given the non-ALR economics that the site has been subject to for decades. More importantly, without the money extracted from development, the viability of the land would be significantly less due to its hydrology challenges.
This proposal does something that this region does not often see – the transference of a major piece of land within a municipal boundary back into the ALR by the land owner – a developer– where the land will then have many checks and balances to preserve it for future agriculture. I believe that the transference of 285 acres of farmland back into the ALR is sufficient reason to support this project from Metro’s point of view.
Above and beyond that, the developer will use profits from development on a portion of the land to upgrade the quality of the land – to the tune of nine million dollars – money most farmers can never find in the thin margins of field agriculture. With that investment, the land will not just be another poorly producing piece of land in the ALR, it will be a top quality land capable of high productivity.
Delta has backed the Metro Board into a corner
Several years ago, Delta was working with their Metro partners in the advancement of the Growth Management Plan and establishment of a new Growth Boundary. As part of the Growth Management Plan, Delta agreed to absorb approximately 1,000 new residents per year for the life of the Growth Plan. While they agreed to this growth, they did not correspondingly identify where this growth would occur in Delta’s neighbourhoods, who have been experiencing actual negative growth in many areas even as the rest of the region grow rapidly.
If these new units are built within the existing neighbourhoods of Delta, the change will be monumental and rapid. That growth commitment represents massive land assembly, demolition and intensification of every neighbourhood in Delta at a rate similar to that experienced by the City of Vancouver over the past few decades. For instance, it would take two to three 20 storey towers to be built and occupied per year to absorb those 1,000 residents – every year for as long as that growth occurs – or many hundreds of new townhouses and apartment buildings to be inserted into existing neighbourhoods to replace existing single family homes. Delta needs additional green-field lands to absorb that growth for the next few years while they prepare existing neighbourhoods for the wave of intensification they have committed to through the Growth Plan.
A number of us professional planners recommended to Delta that other municipalities were adopting “Study Area” classifications for sites like Southlands to ensure they did not back the Metro Board into an uncomfortable position of having to amend the Growth Boundary shortly after its adoption. However, while the Boundary was being adopted, Delta was simultaneously negotiating in good faith with several large landowners outside the Boundary, including the Century Group regarding Southlands. Unfortunately, Delta has done what we feared, backed Metro into a corner by asking for this change so soon after the Plan was adopted.
In this context, it is advisable that the Metro Board approve this boundary change in order to preserve the overall Growth Management Plan, because without the few sites Delta has outside the ALR like Southlands, it has no hope of meeting its growth responsibilities – which are key to the integrity of the overall Growth Management Plan.
This then raises the issue of changing this piece of public policy within a year of its adoption.
Changing the Growth Boundary is acceptable from a public policy and public interest point of view
Every municipality represented on the Metro Board changes their policies on a regular basis through rezonings, OCP amendments, amending various plans, and changing policies on many issues. We change policies because it is in the public interest to do so – we are not slaves to policies adopted in the past when they do not allow the realization of optimum public interest.
Delta’s choice to not classify the land in question as a Study Area is unfortunate, however it is not the Board’s responsibility or fault that this occurred.
Rather it now is the Board’s responsibility to evaluate the application on its own terms and determine what is in the public interest.
There is no precedent being set through a change
A further perspective on the issue of policy is the fear some have voiced regarding the setting of a precedent of further Boundary changes. While it is understandable that those who do not understand Metro’s jurisdiction would feel this way, there is no precedent set regardless of whether the Board approves or denies this application.
The Board is not a judicial body where “common law” is set through its decisions via precedent. The “door is always shut” so to speak unless the Board opens it on a case by case basis – and therefore there can be no precedent set.
The Southlands’ Developer is very unique – unlike any other developer
Regarding the suggestion that if this change is approved, “developers will line up at the door for changes across the region”, I suggest that is also a misguided fear.
I work for a development company and serve on the Board of the Urban Development Institute and as such, have a good understanding of how a regular developer would approach a site or project like the Southlands.
The Hodgins family built Tsawassen over the past century and they have a deep connection to the place and the land. The investment that Sean Hodgins has put into this property and project goes far beyond what any other developer would invest. The years of work, the investment of millions of dollars in planning, community consultation, the inclusion of leading academic thinkers and the commitment to innovation in favour of the regional food system, combined with a commitment of $9 million to simply upgrade the fertility of the remaining farmland destined for the ALR is simply unprecedented.
There are no other developers in the Lower Mainland who would invest what the Century Group has in a project like this for the right to develop a few hundred homes.
Ironically, it might be a good step to see the Southlands project as a precedent for anyone who wants to develop on any type of agricultural land anywhere in the region. The precedent set by this level of commitment and investment from the Hodgins family would scare most developers away completely.
As such, I encourage Board members to not see this application as a “run-of-the-mill” project – rather it is a unique project based on deep commitment to the community and to the regional food system.
And now I would like to explore the “deeper public interest” embodied in the Southlands project because of how it is consciously approaching the reality of the food systems in the Metro region for this century.
The future of the Metro region requires a new approach to its food systems
Over the upcoming decades of this century, we will see the population of the Lower Mainland double. With that doubling will come the need to double our housing capacity and to more than double our industrial and commercial space because we are the economic gateway to the Pacific for a major part of North America.
Currently the mantra in the region is simply to build denser and invest in transit lines. While these are necessary, we have a much more significant challenge awaiting – and that is how we intend to increase food production and preserve our ecosystem web across the region while we double everything else.
Some may believe that the only issue at stake is simply to preserve farmland, the ALR and environmentally sensitive areas – and the rest will take care of itself. This however is not correct – for the best we could possibly achieve then is simply to lose little of what we have now on an ongoing basis until most of it is gone – when in fact we need to actually increase food production at the same time as we increase housing and jobs. The simplistic preservation-only approach will fail to achieve its objectives.
There are many who would suggest to the Board and even some on the Board who believe that the super-low intensity agriculture of the pre-21st century agricultural economy is the only version of agriculture. With a few moments of thought about the future, about global food economics, and about innovations in food system technology, it should become immediately apparent that approaching agricultural lands immediately adjacent to a region with millions of people suggests opportunities for a more innovative approach and super- low intensity agriculture competing against Mexico, Chile, and other low-wage food producers around the world.
As a leading first world, industrialized country, our too often limited approach to agriculture has put us head to head competition in raw production economics with every country in the world – most all of whom have either very cheap labour or major agricultural subsidies. We cannot win in that competition – and the results of that approach in our food system and the resulting food miles for the food in your and my refrigerators and cupboards is self-evident. 85-97% of the economic, social and environmental impact in our food system happens post-field – and that is economic terrain we can win at in our region.
The pressures of growth, transportation, industry, food production and environmental protection are not going to lessen and go away in our region – rather they will intensify and will now be showing up on your policy and decision tables every year for the rest of the 21st century. The results of these pressures are already being seen in today’s re-evaluation of ALR policies in this province.
Retreating to a position of simplistic land use tradeoffs based on out-of-date models of planning and early 20th century agriculture in a contemporary sustainability-oriented region, will result in major losses to all of us and extreme politicization of agricultural discussions. Robust and good policy has never been made in a context of extreme politicization – and more importantly, agriculture usually loses in those battles.
If the Board truly wants to preserve the integrity and potential of the regional food system, it needs to embrace new approaches where agriculture and food systems can be improved, intensified and integrated into the relentless growth that this region will experience going forwards.
The Southlands is such a project. It has consciously addressed its strategic role in the sustainability of the community and its food systems and envisioned a new approach with many public benefits.
A new approach to sustainable urban and regional food systems in the 21st century Metro region
As a competitive region pursuing sustainable communities and economics, we need to reach past this poverty-oriented race to the bottom of 20th century agricultural production and the land use patterns that accompany that scenario, and instead envision how we can use our agricultural lands for maximum value in food production and the food system overall in the contemporary Metro context, while we simultaneously accommodate growth.
To achieve this will require a new approach to how we envision and integrate food production, ecosystem enhancement, housing and jobs – all within the same pieces of land.
The Southlands project is a beacon example of how we can begin to do things differently. It has become widely recognized as one of the leading examples of new thinking in how agriculture and urbanism can be integrated – and even though it has not been built yet, the concept created around this project is now being copied across North America. This trend recently achieved high profile in the New York Times.
Southlands is a pilot project of new ways to accommodate growth in a manner that supports the food system, diversity of housing, transit-supportive neighbourhoods, and environmental preservation. Southlands converts benefits from development into benefits to agriculture and the local food system.
By approving this application, Metro will be positioning itself at the leading edge of sustainable urban planning and food systems. It will generate economic growth, jobs, taxes and community amenities, and make Delta more transit friendly, more prosperous, and more agriculturally and ecologically secure.
If every developer working on viable farmland in the Lower Mainland had this vision, the polemics of development and food systems would be very different today in this region.
I encourage you to approve this application to both preserve more land in the ALR, as well as to allow a new example of a more positive relationship between communities, the environment and food systems to emerge here in this region, on your watch.
Thank you
Mark Holland