Are you satisfied with Greater Victoria’s regional development?
Do you wonder if growth itself is a problem as well as a blessing; that growth might expand a population beyond a decent, sustainable quality of life?
Of course, it largely depends on the form growth takes.
The region faces powerful pressures. Explosive urban growth can result from new households alone, whether based on transitory or sustainable jobs. New households induce public and private investment: homes, furniture, schools, post offices, streets and highways, fire and police protection, and more. This investment in turn induces more economic activity.
But this process also works in reverse. To avoid boom and bust, the underlying support of new households must be sustainable.
Judging from the ongoing concern shown by this newspaper’s contributors, current growth policy is failing to protect this region’s quality of life. Yet quality of life is our major advantage in attracting a sustainable economic base.
Healthy communities do not come from market-generated sprawl or willy-nilly development. This is especially true for communities that remain dependent on fossil fuels in a radically warming world.
We should not continue to rely on largely unplanned urban land markets, literally fossil-fuel driven, to direct growth. This approach has clearly failed. Without context and co-ordination, such markets cannot solve many major issues defining the future: congestion, efficient public transportation, affordable housing, progress on economic decarbonization, the provision of parks and of green space and the building of complete communities.
As noted in a recent Times Colonist editorial, strong land-use and transportation leadership is required. An effective regional framework for this co-ordination can only be supplied by our provincial government.
An attempt was made by the province’s regional growth strategy legislation, adopted in 2003. The RGS recognized the need to protect our quality of life. It focused on achieving complete communities. Such communities attempt to provide options for easy access to daily needs, as much as possible on foot, and in interaction with neighbours. This requires a variety of densities to meet life-cycle family needs. It also needs strong land-use co-ordination supported by a range of transportation options.
Unfortunately, RGS implementation has relied on buy-in by the patchwork of municipalities and regional districts that we call local government. Despite good intentions, this patchwork has been unable to provide the necessary land-use and transportation co-ordination.
We now have an amended RGS under consideration, but it is not likely to markedly improve matters. RGS implementation continues to rely largely on optimistic words found in the region’s many official community plans, including “regional context statements.”
This approach has failed. It has done little to prevent extreme road congestion, sewage chaos, opportunistic and ad hoc rezoning, piecemeal exclusions from the Agricultural Land Reserve, ineffectively co-ordinated and sprawling development, and a reactive, obsolete and expensive transportation sector.
It is important to note that serious political problems exist. These are most obviously illustrated by shopping-mall developers seeking “friendly” local jurisdictions. Problems include federal authorities exempt from local regulations, a passive provincial government, poor co-ordination of physical planning, developers playing off local jurisdictions (over tax revenues and low-wage jobs), friendly politicians elected when an area is ripe for development, poor transportation and transit options, “race to the bottom” tax breaks and an apparent ignorance of what constitutes a “complete” community.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Transportation continues to reinforce our car-led, “dumbbell” shaped urban pattern. Is it imagined that a new interchange here or a widening there is sufficient? All this while local governments continue to build out the region’s two major population centres, connected by one road, often gridlocked.
Never mind that this critical road also serves as our major evacuation route and up-Island connector.
Ironically, for decades we have wilfully neglected a major opportunity to use transportation-oriented development to build our Island’s future around an electrified railway. We grumble about the cost of our existing public-transportation system while neglecting to note the incredible cost of carbon-polluting automobile dependency to society and individuals.
The fact is that in Canada, constitutional authority for urban development lies with the provinces. These problems will not be solved without provincial leadership. Success will require that we citizens, and our premier, support the active use of transportation-access and land-use controls as major policy levers to direct development and build complete communities.
Gerald Walter taught ecological and urban land economics at the University of Victoria until retiring in 2003.
