Thursday, February 5, 2009

February 2009 Communities in Transition Information Resource

COLLABORATIONS and partnerships are fundamental to the success of CIT projects. They “add value” to projects by bringing people and resources, often with diverse perspectives on land and conservation, together in the pursuit of common goals: to help communities make effective
transitions.


©Lora Tryon / 2008-2009

This issue of the CIT Information Resource highlights several CIT collaborations, in projects as diverse as housing, conservation, and sustainable community development. Our featured photo by Lora Tryon, shows the Millard Creek estuary in the Comox Valley. It's a fitting image, as this small watershed is the site of a collaboration between the conservation & stewardship (C&S) sector and local government in the Comox Valley, a collaboration that should make a positive impact on land use policies and development in the region. … (more at Editorial Notes)


In the February 2009 issue:

FOCUS ON NORTHERN HOUSING ISSUES: Tim Pringle talks about housing and its role in the economic and social well-being of BC’s northern communities.

“Being able to retain or attract households, especially seniors’ households, has a significant economic multiplier effect in communities and in the region. Perhaps more important than the retirement and investment income these men and women represent is the social heritage values they embody. These values are important to long-term community quality of life.”… (more at Tim Pringle on Northern Housing)


LEARNING LUNCHES: Guest columnist Kim Stephens talks about a seminar series that is protecting stream health and building sustainable communities on Vancouver Island

“Vancouver Island is the pilot region for a precedent-setting approach to informing and educating those who influence or impact how land is developed and water is used. Through CAVI - Convening for Action on Vancouver Island, we are cultivating broad, inclusive partnerships and collaboration that reach for the common goal of sustainability. In short, we set our sights on the common good and challenge the old barriers of jurisdictional interests. To achieve the common good, CAVI is bringing together: Local government, developers, the Province, universities and colleges, and the conservation and stewardship (C&S) sector.

“Our immediate objective is to foster ‘green choices’ that will ripple through time, and will be cumulative in creating sustainable, liveable communities and protecting stream health. … (more at Guest Column - Learning Lunches)


CLIMATE CHANGE 3: The final segment of our series on climate change focuses on planning for “Positive Settlement Choices”

“I’m pretty positive about the future... but we need to have the conversations in our communities [that will generate] the kind of mobilization we had in WWII. [This] is what we’re going to need now.” The quote is from Bruce Sampson, Former VP Sustainability, BC Hydro, speaking at last year’s Gaining Ground 2 conference. This article lays out some of the financial urgency behind such a mobilization, and draws on work done by Patrick Condon and UBC’s Design Centre for Sustainability to outline steps that land use practitioners need to be taking immediately to protect and sustain community liveability.… (more at Climate Change 3)


WHEN THINGS SLOW DOWN: Our feature article looks at how a slower real estate and development market provides some opportunities to advance sustainable land use practices.

“The rates of growth and development in many BC communities have had a huge impact on ecosystem health - and community sustainability. Between 1991 and 2002, for example, “60% of previously unmodified sensitive ecosystem lands” and 97% of second growth forests and seasonally flooded agricultural fields “were either lost, fragmented, or reduced” in the Comox Valley. The current slowdown in the housing market (housing starts across BC are expected to fall as much as 45% from 2006 and 2007 highs) will see a short term reduction of pressures on the land base. But as a number of land use practitioners suggest, the current slowdown should be a busy time for anyone with an interest in protecting and enhancing existing ecosystems.” … (more at Feature - When Things Slow Down)


ABOUT COMMUNITIES IN TRANSITION
If you're new to CIT, go to www.communitytransition.org/about for background on this Special Program of the Real Estate Foundation of BC.

For more information regarding CIT applications and projects please contact Jen McCaffrey, CIT Coordinator with the Real Estate Foundation of BC at info@communitytransition.org or 604-688-6800 /1-866-912-6800.

We look forward to sharing these resources with you. We welcome your suggestions as to how we can be more effective in communicating with you and your peers.


PLEASE NOTE THAT THE CIT SITE IS STILL IN DEVELOPMENT.
We are making a number of changes to make the site more functional as a place of conversation. We hope to see these changes in place within about four months. In the meantime, keep the conversation going:
* let us know how we’re doing
* let us know where you think we should be putting our attention
* give our writers and researchers feedback on the conversations they’re engaged in.

You can email me directly at "editor (at) communtytransition.org". You can also contact Jen, Tim, or Karin Kirkpatrick (Executive Director at the Real Estate Foundation as of November 1st) through the Foundation.

hans peter meyer
CIT Information Resource Editor & Writer
editor (at) communitytransition.org


IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO RECEIVE CIT RELATED EMAILS, please let us know with an email to info@communitytransition.org marked "REMOVE" in the subject header.

Editorial Notes - February 4, 2009

©Lora Tryon / 2008-2009

COLLABORATIONS and partnerships are fundamental to the success of CIT projects. They “add value” to projects by bringing people and resources, often with diverse perspectives on land and conservation, together in the pursuit of common goals: to help communities make effective transitions.

This issue of the CIT Information Resource highlights several CIT collaborations, in projects as diverse as housing, conservation, and sustainable community development. Our featured photo by Lora Tryon, shows the Millard Creek estuary in the Comox Valley. It's a fitting image, as this small watershed is the site of a collaboration between the conservation & stewardship (C&S) sector and local government in the Comox Valley, a collaboration that should make a positive impact on land use policies and development in the region.

As our guest columnist, Kim Stephens talks about the ground-breaking work being done by CAVI (Convening for Action on Vancouver Island). Kim's focus is on the "Learning Lunches" hosted by CAVI in several Island communities, involving the partnership of local governments, environmental non-governmental organizations, provincial ministries, federal government departments, as well as organizatons like BC Water & Waste Association and the Real Estate Foundation of BC. One of the outcomes of this informal series is the innovative Millard/Piercy project.

"When Things Slow Down” looks at the kinds of things land use practitioners are doing now that construction and development-driven workloads are easing off. As well as investing in much-needed planning, it's a good time to be undertaking the kind of data-gathering work being done through projects like the Millard/Piercy watershed inventory.

The third and final in a series of columns on Climate Change challenges land use practitioners to re-imagine our understanding of what our towns and cities look like, how they function, what we need to do to adapt to not only changing climatic conditions, but the financial impact of these changes. Again, collaborations like CAVI and those taking shape in the Comox Valley suggest that many partners are looking for ways to go beyond jurisdictional limitations to address issues that call for regional and watershed-based approaches.

This issue’s interview with Tim Pringle, Director of Special Programs at the Real Estate Foundation, and responsible for CIT, focuses on recent housing research being done in northern BC communities. As Tim explains, this is not just about shelter or land use; it’s also about the economic and social well-being of communities. While the focus is on northern communities, we think our readers in the rest of BC will find the preliminary findings and Tim’s observations helpful in deepening the conversation about community sustainability.

For our next issue (arriving in your “in-box” mid March 2009) we’re working on materials related to: reviews of current CIT projects, an introduction to the thorny issue of performance-based approaches to land use, and some thoughts, several months after the event, about the October 2008 Rural Revitalization conference in Prince George, and more conversations with land use practitioners. Your contributions are welcome! Let us know how we’re doing. Let us know where you think we should be putting our attention. Give our writers and researchers feedback on the conversations they’re engaged in.

Please note that the CIT Information Resource is still in development. We are making a number of changes to make the site more functional as a place for conversation. We’d like to thank the Real Estate Institute of BC, and particularly Chris Alexandrovich, for helping us keep the conversation going by hosting this issue.

You can email me directly at "editor (at) communtytransition.org". Or, you can contact Jen or Tim or Karin Kirkpatrick (Executive Director at the Real Estate Foundation as of November 1st) through the Foundation (www.realestatefoundation.com). We look forward to hearing from you!

hans peter meyer
Editor, Communities in Transition Information Resource

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©hanspetermeyer.ca / 2009

Focus on Northern Housing Issues: An interview with Tim Pringle, Director of Special Programs at the Real Estate Foundation of BC

by hans peter meyer

One of the outcomes of the October 2008 “Reversing the Tide” conference in Prince George is a study of housing issues in BC’s north. The research is being done through the Communities in Transition program at the Real Estate Foundation of BC, and involves the Real Estate Institute of BC (REIBC) as a partner. Tim Pringle, Director of Special Programs at REF and responsible for CIT, describes why this is important to northern communities.

“Being able to retain or attract households, especially seniors’ households, has a significant economic multiplier effect in communities and in the region. Perhaps more important than the retirement and investment income these men and women represent is the social heritage values they embody. These values are important to long-term community quality of life.”

The northern housing research being conducted through CIT is an example of how partners, in this case REF and REIBC, are able to get "added" value by collaborating. "Sharing resources through CIT allows partners to get better research, in this case allowing for an expansion into three related research elements. This enables the partners to get a closer look at the question of how can communities retain and attract households.” The three pieces of research currently underway include: an inventory of housing stock and relative match to what people say the are needing; strategies that communities might pursue to attract and retain households; and a demonstration project involving Smart Growth on the Ground (SGOG).

“One of our case studies involves Smithers. We’re looking at the impact of amenity migration and will make some recommendations for the community to consider.” The second case study is Prince George and involves several elements. “Among other things, we’ll look at a demonstration development based on the kind of latent needs we’ve discovered, as well as a special housing service need that the Aboriginal Business Development Centre in Prince George has identified. This project has many possibilities, including: housing for seniors and disabled persons; a hostel for travelers, which could serve as an emergency shelter in the off-season. It could also include some retail and commercial space. We’re looking at the factors that will give the project enough scale to make it economically viable to build.”

Preliminary analysis is showing some anomalies - and some opportunities - in the northern housing market. “We’ve discovered that 37% of the sample say they plan to move within the next five years. Their reasons have to do with some age-related factors, ie. not wanting to shovel snow or maintain a single family dwelling or a large property. In some cases, the reasons given are health-related: they need to be closer to services.” While not all are wanting to move south, they are all wanting to move to a different kind of dwelling or dwelling location.” Without access to this kind of research, the market has continued to focus on construction of large lot, single family dwellings (SFD).

“We think that communities need to be looking at the latent demand for different kinds of housing. We don’t know if a senior wanting to move out of a SFD wants to buy a condo or strata property. But the numbers of households in the region which may not typically be attracted to SFDs - like seniors, persons with disabilities, and students - is significant. We think this appears to be a fairly sizable latent demand among home-buyers or renters for units that aren’t being built.” This is an opportunity, particularly in Prince George and other centres. “Strata, apartment, or townhouse style dwellings could be located close to commercial and service centres to provide more affordable, lower maintenance, and less auto-dependent housing and access to services. These will be attractive to a number of different buyers.”

Terrace provides an example of a builder seizing this opportunity. “Faced with his father's changing housing needs, one developer built and marketted 36 units of single-storey condos close to downtown. He did very well, and is considering doing more of this kind of housing. By working a niche market he's also providing a valuable service for the community of Terrace, helping to keep people in the community by giving them an option other than moving away.”

With most of 37% surveyed looking outside of the region to meet housing needs within five years, the impact on norther economies could be significant. There is, therefore, some urgency on the part of northern communities to develop housing strategies focused on retention. Developing new housing options will also broaden the market base. “In recent years the northern housing market has been quit active, but it will go into a slower period again. The opportunity remains for northern communites to supply the types of dwellings that local residents need.” Servicing that market will help communities retain and attract households, and generate economic activity in construction and services.

The third part of the northern housing research has to do with REIBC’s involvement as a partner in Smart Growth on the Ground in Prince George. “This is a design-based revitalization strategy for the city centre area. Through a demonstration project we will broadly determine what is economical to build, what kinds of mixed uses are possible, market demand for these uses, cost of housing, and so forth. REIBC wants our housing research to feed into this demonstration project. It will have a very applied orientation.”

“One of the mandates of the Community in Transition program is to work with various partners on projects that have valuable lessons from which they can learn. The current northern housing research is demonstrating the value of doing research, how to do it, and the practical results that may come out of such an approach. We believe that these will have a positive impact on community quality of life in northern communities.”

For more information on the northern housing study, please contact Tim Pringle at the Real Estate Foundation of BC (www.realestatefoundation.com).

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©hanspetermeyer.ca / 2009

Learning Lunches: Protecting Stream Health and Building Sustainable Communities

by Kim A. Stephens, MEng, PEng

Vancouver Island is the pilot region for a precedent-setting approach to informing and educating those who influence or impact how land is developed and water is used. Through CAVI - Convening for Action on Vancouver Island, we are cultivating broad, inclusive partnerships and collaboration that reach for the common goal of sustainability. In short, we set our sights on the common good and challenge the old barriers of jurisdictional interests. To achieve the common good, CAVI is bringing together:

* Local government – those who plan and regulate land use;
* Developers – those who build;
* The Province – those who provide the legislative framework;
* Universities and colleges – those who provide research; and
* The conservation and stewardship (C&S) sector – those who advocate conservation of resources.


Our immediate objective is to foster ‘green choices’ that will ripple through time, and will be cumulative in creating sustainable, liveable communities and protecting stream health. We are NOT saying that every community must follow the same formula; what we are saying is that everyone needs to agree on universal values, and thereafter each community can reach its goal in its own way.


Regional Team Approach

The CAVI vision is to move toward water sustainability by implementing green infrastructure policies and practices. CAVI defines green infrastructure in terms of a Design with Nature approach to land development and climate change adaptation.


Adaptation is about responding to the changes that will inevitably occur. Adaptation takes place at the community level and is therefore about collaboration. If we can show how to get the water part right, then other parts are more likely to follow.


To get to the big picture, it starts with the smallest pieces. Hence, the CAVI program is advancing a regional team approach that aligns local actions with provincial policy goals, in particular those defined in the Living Water Smart guidance document.



Vancouver Island Learning Lunch Seminar Series

Living Water Smart is the provincial government’s vision and plan to keep BC's water healthy and secure for the future. An over-arching goal is to encourage land and water managers and users to do business differently. Living Water Smart provided context that helped us frame the learning outcomes for the 2008 Vancouver Island Learning Lunch Seminar Series.


“When we came up with the Learning Lunch idea, our objectives and expectations were quite modest,” says John Finnie, CAVI Chair. “We wanted to explore a collaborative approach that we believed would help local governments make informed land development decisions that meet multiple objectives.”


“Initially we were thinking in terms of a small group setting...perhaps 12 to 15 people drawn from the various departments within a willing local government. We wanted to bring together engineers, planners, building inspectors, and bylaw enforcement officers; and we wanted the focus to be on aligning efforts to implement effective green infrastructure.”


The idea resonated, so much so that the original inter-departmental concept quickly mushroomed into an inter-governmental concept. The Cowichan Valley Regional District and City of Courtenay both volunteered to host a regional seminar series, in part because of the opportunity to play a leadership role provincially.


Each series comprised three seminars. Spreading the curriculum over three sessions enables participants to take in new information, reflect on it, blend it with their own experience, test it, and eventually apply it in making decisions. In terms of the actual curriculum design, it was a matter of drawing upon a number of provincial guidance documents (notably Stormwater Planning: A Guidebook for British Columbia) and making them interesting and relevant to a mixed audience.


Overview of Series Outcomes

The Learning Lunch Seminar Series helped local government representatives conceptualize why a consistent regional approach to rainwater management and green infrastructure is needed.


For Kate Miller, Environmental Manager for the Cowichan Valley Regional District, the series provided an opportunity to develop a policy framework for the Valley. “It meant that we could foster an informed dialogue that would ultimately lead to adoption of a set of tools for implementing green infrastructure region-wide.”


As an outcome of the series, Cowichan Valley local governments proceeded with the Cowichan Valley Water Balance Model Forum in October 2008. Three willing development proponents and their planning/design consultants were invited to develop case study applications of the Water Balance Model, a web-based tool for evaluating how to achieve runoff-based performance targets.


The case studies were shared at the Forum in order to help build a common understanding. This educational approach is helping Comox Valley local governments identify and empower a core group of local champions who will then have the expertise to apply and advance the water balance approach to land development.


"Our challenge is to work around and with boundaries," says Derek Richmond, Manager of Engineering for the City of Courtenay. "Ideally, we would like to shift the paradigm from boundaries to areas of commonality.” For Derek, the series provided the springboard for bottom-up regional action in the Comox Valley to communicate, cooperate, collaborate and coordinate.


An example is the Millard/Piercy Gaps Analysis Project, which has evolved from a simple regulatory gaps analysis to a regional pilot that will inform watershed-based land use planning across jurisdictions. “The current process has the Comox Valley Land Trust collaborating with regional and municipal planners, engineers, and elected representatives to develop a new way of doing business in the Comox Valley.”


A Look Ahead

In undertaking the Learning Lunch series, the initial limited objective was simply to explore a collaborative approach to practitioner education. Success begets success. Now that the vision for a regional team approach has taken on a life of its own in both the Cowichan and Comox Valleys, CAVI believes the time is right to start talking about Vancouver Island as a whole in terms of sustainability, collaboration and creative partnerships.


Who is CAVI?


The CAVI Partnership comprises the British Columbia Water & Waste Association, the Real Estate Foundation of British Columbia, the provincial Ministries of Environment and Community Development, and the Green Infrastructure Partnership. CAVI is co-funded by the Province and the Real Estate Foundation of British Columbia. The Water Sustainability Committee of the BCWWA is the managing partner and is providing program delivery.

The CAVI Leadership Team comprises individuals from across sectors and representing local and provincial governments, Highlands Stewardship Foundation, POLIS Project (University of Victoria), Nature’s Revenue Streams, Real Estate Foundation of BC, Vancouver Island Farmers Alliance, Islands Trust, and the Water Sustainability Action Plan.

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Kim A. Stephens is Program Coordinator, Water Sustainability Action Plan for British Columbia. He can be reached at sustainabilitycoordinator@shaw.ca or through the www.waterbucket.ca site.


References:

* CAVI - Convening for Action on Vancouver Island

* Living Water Smart
* Millard/Piercy Gaps Analysis Project
* Stormwater Planning: A Guidebook for British Columbia
* Water Balance Model
* 2008 Vancouver Island Learning Lunch Seminar Series

©Kim Stephens / 2009

When Things Slow Down: Opportunities for Sustainability

by hans peter meyer


The rates of growth and development in many BC communities have had a huge impact on ecosystem health - and community sustainability. Between 1991 and 2002, for example, “60% of previously unmodified sensitive ecosystem lands” and 97% of second growth forests and seasonally flooded agricultural fields “were either lost, fragmented, or reduced” in the Comox Valley. The current slowdown in the housing market (housing starts across BC are expected to fall as much as 45% from 2006 and 2007 highs) will see a short term reduction of pressures on the land base. But as a number of land use practitioners suggest, the current slowdown should be a busy time for anyone with an interest in protecting and enhancing existing ecosystems.


This slowdown is not a “transient phenomenon,” says Harry Harker. Currently administrator for the Town of High River, Harker was General Manager of Planning with the Regional District of Comox-Strathcona during the boom/bust years of the 1990s. “Sooner or later we’re going to come out of this,” he says, “We got caught the last time...and [weren’t] prepared for the growth that hit.” Local government needs to act now “to actually get some of that ‘forward planning’ in place so that when the market turns we’re prepared to move ahead in a positive fashion.”


“The research we've done tells us that rural communities located in beautiful, natural places, close to open space, with a small town character, will have a long term demand,” says Carole Stark of the Chinook Institute. Small BC communities with significant natural and aesthetic amenities are driven by cyclical tourism and amenity-migration related construction-based economies. While growth may slow, it doesn’t go away for communities in the Kootenays, Vancouver Island, or the Okanagan. While the forecasted drop in unit sales for the Vancouver Island Real Estate Board is steep for 2008, it is only a drop to 2001 levels, roughly equivalent to the level of the strong markets of the mid-90s. Average house prices are forecasted (forecast) to drop to 2004 levels, still 100% higher than average prices in the 1990s. The findings of the Chinook Institute’s research on sustainability reflect what the BC Real Estate Association sees from a market perspective: community quality of life is a driver of healthy housing and development activity. Ironically, the better community stewards get at protecting and enhancing key environmental and social qualities, the greater the demand on the land base that sustains these “key qualities.”


For many local governments, reduced revenues means belt-tightening. For others, this is a good time to invest in long term planning and infrastructure – good things from a “sustainability” perspective. The development industry generally works with long term interests in mind. Without the urgency of numerous proposals and immediate threats to ecosystems, both local government and conservation and stewardship (C&S) sectors should be adopting a similar long term perspective. Indeed, as BC developer John O’Donnell argues, “One of the things municipalities could do in this downturn is to come up with a provincial standard on their sustainability initiatives." As the community sector with the most expertise on local ecosystems, C&S organizations have an important role to play in advancing sustainability policies and practices. This will help businesses who want the “green” market advantage.


Community-driven sustainability approaches are taking shape in the Kootenays and in the Comox Valley. Using science-based data generated under the auspices of the Columbia Basin Trust, the Chinook Institute has been involved in “scenario planning” with several BC communities. In the Comox Valley concurrent strategic planning exercises are unfolding related to sustainability, growth management, and conservation. City of Courtenay administrator Sandy Gray notes that the current slowdown allows staff to be more “focussed” on these exercises. It also allows them to be more engaged with the C&S sector organizations who provide some of the scientific expertise and “local knowledge” so critical to long term success in these processes.


The guiding question for Carole Stark is: “What would you need as a community to have robust strategies for the future?” George Penfold believes that in order to adequately answer that question, it’s critical that communities use this time to do some “serious analysis” about the “impact of proposed developments” and regional “vulnerabilities.” Penfold is Regional Innovation Chair in Community Economic Development at Selkirk College. He says that factoring in “significant structural changes - climate change, and energy pricing in particular” will allow community dialogue to go far beyond short-term costs and benefits. The result is an answer to Stark’s question that not only clarifies community values, it produces policies and practices with long term sustainability consequences.


The slowdown allows other levels of community dialogue to take place that should not be underestimated. With less desk work, Harker tells his staff, “Put your feet on the dirt and talk to landowners... Find those very small places where you can start to talk with people about the future of the community.” The bottom line, whether it’s achieved through a sustainability strategy, scenario planning, or a series of informal conversations, is that a community determine a shared vision of what the future looks like. Harker reminds staff, elected officials, and citizens that, “We need to be thinking: What do we want the town to look like and feel like the next time that surge of growth hits us? We need to be prepared.”


As respected community members, C&S sector leaders have an important role in shaping the dialogue around the complex balancing of economic, ecological, and social practices that leads to sustainability. Developers and business leaders need to learn new ways of doing business, but so do local governments, as well as community leaders in all sectors. Dialogue is taking place in the Comox Valley, in part led by the Regional Conservation Strategy. The South Okanagan Similkameen Conservation Partnership (SOSCP) is facilitating dialogue amongst land use practitioners in that region. On Vancouver Island, Convening for Action VI is effectively building relationships through education. As Victoria developer Gene Miller says, these “community conversations” can’t happen during the urgency of the up-cycle, when everyone, particularly developers, is scrambling just to stay in the game. Like George Penfold, Miller emphasizes that the place to start the community conversation is with a study of the costs and benefits of growth. “Whatever conclusion a community gets to... this is where things get very ecological.”


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Sources:

Comox Valley Land Trust, (Lynda Fyfe) sensitive ecosystem mapping (www.cvlandtrust.org)

BC Real Estate Association, Fall 2008 Housing Forecast (www.bcrea.bc.ca/economics/HousingForecast.pdf)

Building Links, April 23, 2008 Vol. 16, No. 16 (www.buildinglinks.ca)

Invest Comox Valley, Census Highlights (http://www.investcomoxvalley.com/investmentservices/populationgrowth.htm)


©hanspetermeyer.ca / 2009


[Expanded versions of this article are published in The Kingfisher, Winter 2009 and Development Issues - Land, Community, Sustainability. This article was published through the support of the Real Estate Foundation of BC.]

Climate Change 3: Planning for “Positive Settlement Choices”

“I’m pretty positive about the future... but we need to have the conversations in our communities [that will generate] the kind of mobilization we had in WWII. [This] is what we’re going to need now.”

Bruce Sampson, Former VP Sustainability, BC Hydro, speaking at Gaining Ground 2, May 2008, Victoria, BC


by hans peter meyer


Extreme storm events in recent winters have brought the cost of climate change home to a number of BC communities and households. The insurance industry is bracing itself for higher costs associated with claims related to climate change, and the anticipated hikes in premiums will hit all of us who own or rent homes and business properties. In a sobering essay on the need for planning models that will help us be effective in our efforts to do more than simply push cash at the problem, UBC’s Patrick Condon cites a 2007 British Treasury Department review on the “Economics of Climate Change.” The report warns that the financial “costs of correcting this problem [are] affordable in the short term, but if nothing [is] done soon, the coming global economic calamity [will] make the depression of the 1930s look like a period of great luxury.” Condon's essay and the Treasury report were written before the current global financial crisis. Failure to plan for adaptation and mitigation of climate change becomes even more critical in the current context.


The science on climactic change suggests that the single most effective step BC communities can take in the face of this threat is to enhance our ecological and economic resilience. We do this by conserving, protecting, and rehabilitating the ecological systems in our regions. Conservation, however, only stems the tide. We need also to get at the source of the emissions that our conserved forests and fields are so effective at storing. The problem is that we have an approach to land use and development that is most vexing: approximately 25% of Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from auto exhaust, says Condon, “and this amount is growing.” We’ve built our communities on the basis of cheap, single occupancy vehicle (SOV) transportation. We're now just beginning to pay the price. Sprawling rural and suburban growth has put us in a bind: it’s hard to rationalize public transit, or other service efficiencies; we're facing huge costs to build roads and bridges to facilitate ever more SOVs. What we need, says Condon, is a “more carbon-efficient relationship between transportation and land use...”


In BC, the people who control the shape of growth are local government officials, civic staff like planners and engineers, and developers – and ourselves as home buyers. We need, as former BC Hydro VP of Sustainability Bruce Sampson put it, to have conversations at a community level that lead to a general "mobilization." We need our elected leaders and our municipal staff – and those of us who own and develop land – to seriously look at policies and practices that will address our climate change challenges. Condon, whose work on sustainable planning at UBC's Design Centre for Sustainability has helped make Vancouver an international focal point for practical approaches to sustainable community design, suggests looking at our cities and towns as “Machine[s] for Carbon Mitigation” – human-built constructs “capable of extensive adaptation for GHG reduction.” His thinking dovetails with Nicholas Heap's assessment in Hot Properties, a report on the impact of climate change on real estate values and the industry.


The value of homes, businesses, and recreational properties in BC is an important part of our current prosperity. Sustaining and protecting these values is in the interest of the real estate industry, but also in the interest of individual homeowners, and certainly of local government which is charged, at least indirectly, with providing a policy and regulatory framework to sustain community land and economic values. Heap makes several recommendations to planners and regulators consistent with Condon’s call for a reimagining of our communities as more “carbon-efficient” and more resilient to climactic change. A partial list includes:

• ensuring that zoning and development guidelines adequately protect residents and local development against identified vulnerabilities to global warming – and the municipality itself from liability – when planning or permitting new development, installinng infrastruture or approving retrofits to existing developments;

• recognizing the influence of urban form over greenhouse gas emissions, and implement policies that result in reduced emissions per capita over time.


From these first steps a series of policies would emerge, including general principles like, but not be limited to:

• intensification of town centres by promoting mixed use development;

• reinvestment along empty corridors and brownfields and redevelopment of strip mall type roads;

• promotion of regional planning, alternatives to SOV transportation; and

• protection of existing compact residential development.


Taking these steps now – or having taken them in the past – is helping make a number of cities and towns more carbon-efficient right now. The tools we need aren’t new, nor are they particularly challenging to our current expectations about quality of life. In some cases, all that is required is to look at planning and settlement patterns in parts of Europe. In other words, even with the current economic downturn, developing land use practices that are adaptive to climate change and that mitigate its impact are not a 'return to the Stone Age' but an opportunity to address issues of social, cultural, and environmental quality of life that will benefit the community and the economy. For his part, Sampson challenged community and business leaders to assume a new willingness to embrace certain kinds of risk – not the risk of wishing climate change away, but of trying out planning and engineering tools that are being used in other parts of the world. We need to risk weaning ourselves from the “old business-as-usual” and experiment with approaches that are new to us.


Building on successful implementation, we can explore visions of community design and land use that give us better quality of life than we currently enjoy in many of our towns and cities. Condon imagines “[s]treet infrastructure reconceptualized to provide a host of unprecedented ecological and transportation services.…[including] storm water management, ground source heating and cooling, and urban heat island mitigation. Streets might be reconceived for bicycles and pedestrians only, while rooftops could be converted for ‘green roof’ community food production and local jobs.” Some of this is already happening in North American cities desperate to make changes in dysfunctional transportation and urban design. The 2008 Gaining Ground 2 conference in Victoria gave ample evidence, from places as diverse as Chicago, Santa Monica, and McAllen, Texas.


Condon is not sanguine about the challenge facing towns and cities, or any of us who live with the everyday reality of our carbon-inefficient land use and transportation choices. Nevertheless, a “dramatic reimagining of the city,” he suggests, “may be the only one with sufficient capacity to project the 80 percent reduction in aggregate CO2 production that most experts agree would be required by 2050.”


Like colleagues at UBC and across North America, Europe, and Asia, Condon has been active developing a host of “sustainability” tools. They form part of a growing toolkit that is helping community leaders and developers reimagine our relationship to the land base that we all depend on. Sometimes interest is driven by a growing market interest in “green” development. Most recently, these tools are inviting interest due to the prospect of economic, social, and environmental chaos precipitated by climate change. In themselves, the tools are only part of the answer. They are a set of technologies and applications, ranging from “smart growth” development principles to “design with nature” alternatives to big pipe engineering to “green building.” They include technologies that reduce pollution and taxes, increase civic interaction and recreation, and create healthier, more productive workplaces and homes. Taken together they represent a shift in how we see ourselves in relation to the ecological systems that sustain us.


The benefit of this shift is more than simply forestalling the kind of threat forecast by the British Treasury report. As a recent speaker at the 2008 Gaining Ground conference put it, becoming wiser in our use of land has many benefits, including:

• more mobility choices (including less congestion if we are willing to question the supremacy of the SOV);

• more amenities (higher densities can mean more efficient taxation leading to more choices for recreation and services, the potential for area-wide heating/cooling systems and transportation systems, etc);

• better design qualities leading to higher quality, healthier buildings and neighbourhoods;

• more money in our pockets as we spend less on roads and bridges, as we have more practicable opportunities for affordable housing, and lowered health care costs because we walk more, breathe cleaner air, etc.


The “new business-as-usual” begins with the kinds of conversations generated at Victoria’s Gaining Ground 2008 event. The conference was an excellent opportunity for elected officials, local government planners and engineers, and those wishing to be on the cutting edge of real estate and land development to see and hear how communities are responding positively to the challenges of climate change. Historically, growth in BC communities has been at the expense of social and environmental qualities. With the kind of “reimagining” of land use and development proposed by Condon, and with the kinds of implementation of existing planning tools and knowledge showcased in communities around the world, we are beginning to see examples of how growth can foster positive settlement solutions.


In BC, growth and our current attractiveness to the world presents us with an opportunity. As the west coast Village of Ucluelet is showing us with its stormwater management strategies and expectations of developers, it is possible to reach beyond accepted wisdom, to take the risk of approaches from outside the “old business-as-usual” box. The Ucluelet example is not without its problems, but taking risks has helped this small community expand the conversation of change that needs to take place across BC. It helps mobilize all us who work on or with the land. Together, we can create the “new business-as-usual” polices and practices that integrate our need for housing and economic development with the natural ecosystems that support our quality life on the planet. At a time when we're already wrestling with financial challenges to the old business as usual approach, one risk we needn't take is to ignore the implications that climate change is beginning to have on the economic and ecological bottom-lines of our households and communities.

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[A version of this article was originally published in The Island Word, October 2008. This article was published through the support of the Real Estate Foundation of BC .]


resources:

Patrick Condon, “Planning for Climate Change" in Land Lines, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, January 2008

Nicholas Heap, Hot Properties: How Global Warming Could Transform BC’s Real Estate Sector, 2007


© hanspetermeyer.ca / 2008-2009

www.realestatefoundation.com