Our Official Community Plan (OCP) update process is officially off and running. Looking over the existing plan, I realize that the world has changed a lot in the last 15 years but I wonder how many of the old assumptions that framed so much of the very earliest community plans will be accepted again without very much serious analysis. Many of the people who moved to Bowen in the 1970s were concerned that the modern world was about to fall into chaos through nuclear war, environmental catastrophe or economic collapse. We left the city in search of a safer and friendlier environment to raise our children. Today the fears have changed to gang violence, drugs and property crime but people still move here to find either a safer place to raise their children or a peaceful place to retire. However the underlying problems that the world now faces are quite different. Today we worry about climate change and our carbon footprint and the amendments that we make to our OCP should reflect that. So how do we acknowledge our new social responsibility and make Bowen as carbon neutral as possible?
Here’s a radical idea that I hope will get some consideration. It started for me when I read that the world will have to reforest 10% of the land currently cleared for agriculture as part of a global strategy to stabilize atmospheric CO2 levels. As the child of a culture that has constantly cleared land to grow ever more food I had to digest that one for a long time. Then I started thinking about how Bowen’s only chance of ever becoming carbon neutral will be to reduce consumption to a point where our forest will be able to absorb the CO2 that we produce. The more land we clear the further away from this ideal we get. Then I thought about the ongoing process of increasing density through the gradual subdivision of acreages into smaller and smaller lots.
Currently there are a number of large parcels of land on Bowen zoned for eventual development into five and ten acre parcels. Very few people actually want to own ten acres of forest but they buy it so that their house will have privacy and they won’t have to worry about a house being built fifty feet away. Another piece of the puzzle is the greenways strategy currently being considered as an amendment to the OCP. The local property rights advocates are dead set against it. The strategy would ensure that wildlife corridors would remain open across the island and ecologically sensitive areas would be protected. The catch is that this may one day stop a subdivision proposal dead in its tracks. But because the strategy can’t map and define every possible situation that may bring the strategy into play, those seeking to protect their property rights are extremely frustrated. So here’s my idea. The maximum size lot that can be created in any future subdivision will be one acre. All densities mandated in the current Land Use Bylaw (LUB) will be honoured. However, the land left over will be preserved in perpetuity as open forest. Let’s say that you have fifty acres that is currently zoned for ten-acre lots. You would be allowed to create five lots at one acre each. These lots could be anywhere on your fifty acres, assuming that they met all of the normal requirements for new lots created. You could cluster the lots to reduce your development costs or put them where the views are best or spread them out for maximum privacy. The buyers would have a full acre for gardening or whatever they liked and they would be assured that the land around them would remain open forest. The forest land would be zoned as passive parkland and held by a third party such as a nature conservancy. In the fullness of time you would achieve the greenways strategy, you would protect property rights and you would preserve and protect the unique character of Bowen Island.
I can appreciate that at first glance most people will be sure that this type of subdivision wouldn’t work but let me make the case. The property owner is almost certainly subdividing the property to sell it. He is concerned about his development costs, the conditions that the Approving Officer is going to impose and, hopefully the quality of his subdivision. Under my scheme he can do pretty much anything that he wants as long as he stays within the total number of lots allowed and makes each lot no more than one acre in size. His potential profit would almost certainly be more than he could make by creating larger lots where one or two of them occupied the best land and the rest were of lesser value and expensive to develop.
From the conservationist perspective it is almost always preferable to open up less land and leave more undisturbed. The deer really don’t seem to mind if the land left for them has a view or not. If we were able to place in nature reserves 50% to 90% of all property being subdivided we would have truly updated our OCP to reflect a sustainable vision of our future.
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