I thank God for the efforts of local museums where archival photographic postings of old barns, small town scenes and community halls help preserve memories of these things and other fast disappearing rural countryside features.
The poignant thing about many of these photos and documents is how deeply they
emphasize the demise of Maple Ridge's as a rural, pastoral paradise.
The destructive nature of urban sprawl began decades ago, and is now fully
evident as small family farms give way to single family small lot residential
subdivisions, and the town core closely resembles any other town where city councils
have lusted after growth.
The open fields, big old farmhouses, cow barns and small garden plots that once
dominated Maple Ridge's rural landscape, have been supplanted by scattered,
poorly planned and even more poorly serviced subdivisions.
The official community plan of the 1980s, which was supposed to safeguard
against the loss of quality of life, has become the very instrument which has
hastened the demise of broadly based community spirit and preservation of a
desirable lifestyle.
Some folks think it's merely evidence that Maple Ridge is growing up. Indeed,
Maple Ridge is now a city but I'm not sure that's a good thing. Is it our
destiny to become a scattered collection of subdivisions separated only by
those lands which are not suitable for development?
Not that many years ago there were dozens of small farms in Maple Ridge and
Pitt Meadows which shipped milk to the Fraser Valley Milk Producers Association
plant on the Lougheed Highway in Burnaby. It would be more familiar by its
popular name, Dairyland.
As the number of viable farms and other features which marked Maple Ridge and
Pitt Meadows as distinctively rural communities diminish, the array of
wonderful nostalgic photographic images preserved in museums and private
collections and our own memories will soon be all that remains of that comfortable
past when it was possible to raise a family and grow all they needed to sustain
a satisfactory lifestyle on a few acres or even a large city lot.
Much of the land has become far too valuable to be maintained as small farms.
Other economic factors such as prohibitively high municipal taxes frequently leave most rural property owners with very little choice but to take the money and leave behind a lifestyle, they will never be able to replicate on a small lot in the sprawling suburbs.
If you think I'm exaggerating when I refer to prohibitively high municipal
taxes, you should understand that many people who live-in middle-class homes on
four or five acres are probably paying more than five thousand dollars per year
in property taxes. That amount quickly becomes unaffordable for retired people
or those living on a fixed income.
Official community plans became compulsory in the 1970s and 1980s. These
grossly inadequate documents were supposed to provide a guide for the orderly
development of our community, but that noble experiment has been a colossal
failure.
There has been a terrible lack of vision in the unfolding and ever-changing drama of the official community plan. I simply cannot believe that any municipal council would have approved of the plans if they could have foreseen the results.
The one certain thing is that no council has a mandate to rezone and subdivide
every piece of land from the Golden Ears Mountains to the Fraser River.
Maybe we should slow down a little and allow time to capture more of what is
disappearing before it's all gone.
SANDY Macdougall ... is a retired newspaper reporter. He was elected for three consecutive terms to Maple Ridge municipal council in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and also ran for the Progressive Conservatives in Kim Campbell's ill-fated federal election campaign. He now makes his home in the BC interior community of Kelowna.
Comments
Post a Comment