Dear Editor:
In 2012, when our landlord decided to let his daughter and her family move into the Dundarave house that my family and I had been renting for the five previous years, we decided to rent a nice 1948 cottage in Horseshoe Bay as our new home.
Horseshoe Bay is a lovely place with a lucky name, and it was very quiet, seemingly untouched by the onslaught of apparently unregulated development infecting Metro Vancouver, including much of the North Shore. Fast forward three years and the luck is starting to run out for Horseshoe.
During the past year, For Sale signs have popped up and vanished with increasing frequency in Upper and Lower Horseshoe. Quaint houses/cottages have rapidly been vanishing, replaced by the kind of modern monsters one can now find in every Lower Mainland neighborhood.
But the worst result of all this development is the noise. I used to do my Ph.D-style work from home once in a while (UBC is a long haul), but now I no longer can, unless I permanently pin headphones to my ears and crank up the classical music volume. A rare ultra-modern metal frame house has been under construction next door for over a year now, with no seeming end in sight. (Drilling into metal frames makes a lovely sound, especially at 7:30 a.m.) And another house is coming very soon directly next to the metal-frame monster, and then surely there will be another.
At least Horseshoe Bay residents no longer need to worry about bears coming to town.
Soon my family and I will be on the run again, looking for a pleasant but affordable place to live that is at least marginally within reach of my workplace. Something tells me that the combination of pleasant plus affordable plus near work is going the way of the dodo bird for most Metro Vancouver residents, even for professionals such as myself who would not be facing this situation in most other places (except in London, Hong Kong and such).
The good folks “running” the North Shore neighbourhoods should sit down and ponder this highly troubling situation in earnest. They should look well beyond the dollar signs, and decide what they want to see at the foot of the Coastal Mountains on the still lovely northern shores of Burrard Inlet in five, 10 and 15 years.
Walter Cicha
West Vancouver
What are your thoughts? Send us a letter via email by clicking here or post a comment below.
