The more things change, the more they stay the same. I remember telling an old-timer 25 years ago that Bowen was about to explode. We had been discovered and, no matter how much effort went into slowing down progress a major population boom was just around the corner. He told me people had been telling him that for 20 years but somehow the people of Bowen always managed to dodge the bullet.
The census numbers tell us that we add about 30 to 35 houses every year and the population grows by about 83 people. But when you look at all the new people that you meet it seems that the numbers must be wrong. The truth is that an awful lot of people don’t last all that long living here.
There are the commuters that just can’t hack it anymore. There are the families who find that, once the kids are all in high school they’re spending more time in town than on the island and there are those who retire here but end up moving back to town when they can’t drive anymore.
All in all we’re a much more transient population than we’d like to admit. But back to that development bullet: we’re looking straight down the barrel this time. We’ve got the Cape Roger Curtis (CRC) development proposal, the Snug Cove Master Plan (SCMP) and the surplus lands rezoning proposal. Each of them is aimed at adding hundreds of residential units and doing it fairly quickly. Fortunately things aren’t as serious as they first appear.
The CRC people are starting to realize that their plan is out of scale with the rest of the island. They may eventually get a lot of units but they’ll also have to accept a very, very long build out period. The SCMP will be politely received by council, set on a back counter and used as a reference document when reviewing future proposals. Until the sewer system is upgraded nothing much is going to happen. The application to rezone the first parcels of the surplus lands is so out of touch with the aspirations of the average Bowen Islander that it can’t even be taken seriously. My guess is that it will soon be modified to be somewhat less ambitious.
All of this isn’t to say that we’ve done a stellar job when it comes to community planning. Our official Community Plan created a scenario whereby we would become a low-density residential suburb with no industrial, manufacturing or large-scale commercial base. Housing density requirements conspired to minimize the development of affordable housing and infrastructure upgrades were deliberately designed to limit future growth. Now we have a situation where the jobs available on Bowen don’t pay enough to allow the required workers to live on Bowen.
There is one new wrinkle in predicting how Bowen Islanders will react to the latest development proposals. Our population experienced a significant turnover in residents starting in about 2003. That’s when a lot of property owners saw the opportunity to make a couple of hundred thousand dollars selling their home and moving on. Those who replaced them compared our home prices with the mainland and decided that buying here was a great deal. While some realized that they were moving to a rural area, many believed that they were just moving to an out of the way neighbourhood of Metro Vancouver. The problem is that we can’t offer the amenities that the average urban dweller has come to take for granted. With 3,500 people we can’t afford a hockey rink or a swimming pool or a first class soccer field. These amenities require a municipality with more like 35,000 people.
But, here comes the rub, the development inclined entrepreneurs can promise all of these things. “Just let us build a few hundred townhouses and we’ll pay for all of the facilities you could want.” Of course there is also a wrinkle pushing people in the other direction. The viable population of Bowen is controlled by the size of the ferry. As the commuter population grows, so grows the number of cars overloaded. Commuters voting for increased growth are also voting for increased inconvenience for themselves. So we debate the number of people we need for a sustainable community, the property rights of developers and the community facilities that we would like. But at the end of day the people of Bowen Island will have to decide whether we are a piece of the fabric of Metro Vancouver or the first place you come to when you escape the urban sprawl of Greater Vancouver.
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