Do you ever wonder what Delta would look like today if the Agricultural Land Reserve had never been implemented?
OK, so I probably have too much time on my hands if I'm pondering such things, but I'm pretty sure the Delta we know and love would be a decidedly different place if the New Democrats hadn't introduced that contentious piece of legislation 40 years ago.
Delta was only a half-dozen years away from its centennial when the ALR came into play in 1973, so it was far from a young community. However, the municipality as we know it was really just taking shape at that time thanks to the seminal moment in its history. The opening of the George Massey Tunnel was a game changer, turning Delta from a rural community of about 8,000 to a sprawling suburb of 80,000 in only two decades.
The ALR went a long way to curbing this massive growth by defining our residential boundaries and limiting where houses could sprout. But what if this effort to preserve B.C.'s farmland had never come to pass? Where would the sprawl have ended (if it ended at all) and what would this place look like today?
Would there be any farmland left to separate Ladner from Tsawwassen or would it be one seamless community with nothing more than a yellow line, a la Scott Road, dividing two massive urban areas?
It seems hard to fathom given the small-town, sleepy feel we enjoy today, but the lure of cheap homes less than a half-hour from the city surely would have transformed this area into something that would now be difficult to recognize if growth was allowed to continue unchecked.
Many farms were sacrificed during Delta's building boom, so it only stands to reason that more would have been eaten up if we continued to add 3,000 or 4,000 people to the population every year. Those people would have all required homes, to say nothing of schools, parks, commercial services and more, which would have extended the boundaries of our bedroom communities further into the agricultural sector.
Yet thanks to the ALR, the dividing line between urban and rural has stayed pretty much the same at is was all the way back in 1973.
The Agricultural Land Reserve's primary intention was to preserve farmland, and it's done a good job of achieving that goal, but in Delta's case it has done something much more: The ALR has provided definition to communities that have become small-town jewels in an otherwise burgeoning metropolis.
