Editor:
We cannot imagine a proposal that more ideally meets the contending needs of the community - for more appropriate housing, for recreational use, for locally produced agricultural products - than the plan proposed for the Southlands.
We believe this project could become a destination for urban planners seeking to witness integrated uses functioning symbiotically.
Too often, in Tsawwassen, we have been unwilling to imagine anything beyond the 1960s-and '70s-style of single-family homes. When we have been imaginative and endorsed alternative density, it has been almost exclusively in the form of apartment buildings or, in a couple of instances, small-scale semi-detached developments.
The proposal for a mixed-use development with a range of housing options - including modest, stand-alone cottage homes in a new urbanist, pedestrian-friendly setting - is not only what we need in terms of housing stock to support the diversity of families here, but a model of community-building in its most human sense, on a human scale, with neighbours living in proximity to each other, to the food we consume, and to the natural beauty that has brought us to South Delta in the first place.
As a community, we are presented with a host of phenomenal opportunities: To develop more of the sorts of housing we need; to integrate our neighbourhoods more fully with their surroundings; to ensure (once and for all) that much of this land is preserved in perpetuity for agricultural and for park uses; to complete this beautiful community with a true destination centre where people, nature and agriculture mix harmoniously.
We could make the case that, if this proposal is rejected, a far worse outcome may result in a few years, one filled with greenhouses illuminating the midnight skies or other incompatible uses. And, as a neighbour, we could hardly begrudge the property owners from reverting to a less desirable use if we reject this proposal.
But it should not be necessary to make such a case. This is not a matter of accepting this proposal based on the fear that the alternative could be worse. We should embrace this proposal because it is a superb, imaginative, magnificent, well designed, sustainable - and, yes, extraordinarily generous - proposal offered to our community.
I desperately hope we do not miss this opportunity of a generation.
Patrick Johnson
Paul Tillotson
