Dear Editor:
The unsigned advertising supplement Building the North Shore in your Oct. 30 edition stated in part (referring to the City of North Vancouver): "that 1,500 strata units have been approved or recently completed, and 600 are currently in process."
North Van City Voices has updated the statistics for new developments. Our figures total 4,700 units, not the 2,100 total units stated in the supplement. There are three major developments coming just in Lower Lonsdale.
The Metro Regional Growth Strategy assigned a growth rate of one per cent annually to the city. We have currently exceeded, with the planned development, our 2031 targets for both number of units and population.
At the Oct. 28 policy committee meeting at city council, questions were asked about development cost charge, as well as the cost to residents of all this development, and demand on infrastructure.
The unsigned article also stated that "residential construction also benefits the tax base; the City of North Vancouver, for instance, collected $53,717 for streets and $1,726,931 for parks in development cost charges (DCCs) in 2012."
As pointed out in the consultant's report to the city on the subject of density bonuses and amenities, development cost charges are levied on new development to pay for basic community infrastructure. This encompasses water, sewer, roads, drainage, parkland etc. The City of North Vancouver includes some of these basic needs in the density bonus policy. Collecting $53,717 for streets does not even pay one salary.
Many residents in the city are asking what benefits are coming from all this rush to densify? We have asked before, and now ask again: How will North Vancouver be a better place to live by increasing the population so quickly over the next 20 years? What's wrong with steady growth at a pace we can accommodate, in terms of the increases in services amenities and infrastructure that we'll need? We're not confident that this council's eagerness to approve more condo developments is matched by TransLink's willingness to increase transit service, or the provincial government's willingness to expand our only hospital. Where will our new parks come from? How long before we get a new recreation centre to serve our aging population?
,The apparent bias in favour of densification, combined with this council's philosophy on leveraging density bonusing to achieve social objectives, and its recent track record for approving almost every request to override the limits of the existing OCP - by our count, 15 times over the past couple of years - leaves us concerned that our community is being pushed in a direction that most residents would not support if they were ever asked directly.
Toni Bolton
North Van City Voices
