Editorial Notes: June issue of the Communities in Transition Information Resource

Welcome to the June posting of the CIT Information Resource! Our next posting will be in September. In the interim, many of you will be enjoying the lakes, rivers, and beaches of summer. As well as providing wonderful recreational opportunities, our BC waters are also the source of our ability to create and enjoy healthy communities.

Our "cover picture" comes to us courtesy of CIT's “Healthy Water, Healthy Communities – Lake Windemere Project" in the Invermere area. It's a view of the Lake Windemere wetlands. Wetlands provide a critical connection for wildlife between the terrestrial and aquatic habitats; they also provide very efficient and increasingly important water purification and carbon sequestration roles (see Climate Change 2: Re-Valuing Natural Systems from CIT December 2008). In our September post we'll be reviewing the Lake Windemere project. May your summer boating and water-recreational activities be enjoyable, and exercised with a mind to your impact on surrounding natural and human communities!

Since our last major posting in May there have been a lot of land-use related events and conversations taking place in BC. In early June we posted an interview with Tim Pringle on the Northern Sustainability Summit held in Smithers. The Summit was part of a series of events following up on last fall's Reversing the Tide conference in Prince George. We hope you have a look at this if you're interested in how the Real Estate Foundation is working on community transition issues in BC's north and northwest.

The end of May also marked the gathering of over 800 land use practitioners at the 2009 BC Land Summit in Whistler. This event, engaging individuals from across a broad spectrum of land use perspectives and professions, is an example of how the Foundation supports opportunities to deepen the conversation about land use and sustainability in BC. In an attempt to capture some of the energy of the event, CIT Information Resource interviewed a number of people while they were at the BC Land Summit. Some interviews will be posted in subsequent months, but in this issue we feature pre-conference comments from Sheila Harrington of the Land Trust Alliance of BC, who's organization released new research on conservation and climate change. We have some "first thoughts" from Brenda Southam of the Real Estate Institute of BC. The Real Estate Foundations' Director of Special Programs, Tim Pringle, talks about Robert F. Kennedy's perspective on social and economic change. In our final interview from the Summit in this issue, Mark Holland draws on Summit presenters like Kennedy, Sherry Kafka Wagner, and BC's Angus McAllister and David Zirnheldt to point us towards territory beyond "sustainability." We've been told by the organizers that more materials will be posted to the BC Land Summit website in the near future.

George Penfold came to BC about a dozen years ago after years of outstanding work in land use policy and research in Ontario. A couple of years ago he was named the Regional Innovation Chair for Rural Economic Development at Selkirk College. George has contributed to the CIT Information Resource in the past, and we're very happy to be publishing his current think-piece on the longer term impact of recent amenity migration related development on communities in the Kootenays. Our coverage of the rural economic development issues continues with a second conversation with Vernon-based Victor Cumming, a discussion that looks at some of the follow-up activities to the October '08 Reversing the Tide conference. Climate change is an ongoing concern for anyone working with the land, and Real Estate Foundation staffer Jen McCaffrey continues our coverage of the Climate Action Charter topic with her report on a recent legally-oriented workshop for local government. Finally, with a nod to the rapidly growing impact of virtual communities and online conversations we conclude this issue of the CIT Information Resource with a column on social media that attempts to connect the dots between virtual "community" and the kind that has conversations and takes action in real-time, real-space.

Land use. Climate change. The potential of social media. Rural economic development. These are all topics that are shaping change in BC's rural communities. We believe that the CIT Information Resource has a role to play in engaging land use practitioners in these conversations and in supporting informed dialogue about often difficult issues. We hope you like what you read – or at least find it stimulating to your practice in community. Share this material. Give us feedback. Use the social media tools available – email, comments on blogs, or the telephone – to tell us how we're doing.

We also encourage you to use this material in your own newsletters, blogs, facebook pages, groups, or profiles, and your twitter postings. We want to make our materials as widely available as possible. If you see an opportunity for republication, electronically or in print, for education or non-commercial uses, please feel free to do so. We hope that you, as readers and as practitioners in community transition, will take what you like here, reference it, and share it for educational and non-commercial purpose. We only ask that you let us know how you are using it, even if it’s just to circulate an article in the office or amongst friends. We also look forward to suggestions for opinion pieces, letters to the editor, and reprints of your articles related to CIT themes.

We look forward to hearing from you!

hans peter meyer
Editor, Communities in Transition Information Resource
editor@communitytransition.org

Who Owns the Future of the Kootenays?

by George Penfold

The Kootenay region has been undergoing a significant transformation over the last decade. The primary focus for economic development has been on resort and residential development, focussed on the outdoor activities available in beautiful mountain, lake and river resources we have here. Places like Revelstoke, Golden,Fernie, Kimberley, Radium, Invermere, and Rossland are well down this path, and new development is proposed for the Nelson area. The province supports this type of development with its own BC Resort Strategy and Action Plan.

One of the consequences in the Kootenay region has been a significant increase in construction activity. Between 2001 and 2008, for example, construction related employment increased from 3,600 in 2001 to 9,200 in 2007, with a drop to 8,000 in 2008. Over the past decade, resort and recreation related residential development and construction have become a major new economic driver in this region.

But what has this resort and recreation focus for residential development – what folks in the research community call amenity migration – meant at the community level?

Studies from around the world are consistent in identifying some common issues related to amenity migration such as:

• increasing property values and housing price;
• displacement of both local people and parts of the local economy;
• social and economic change resulting from the pattern of non-resident ownership.

As part of my work as the Regional Chair in Rural Economic Development at Selkirk College I was recently involved in a study of housing affordability for the Columbia Basin and Boundary regions. research findings at posted online here, at Selkirk College. the housing data we gathered we found that non-resident ownership – that is, property titles held by people whose mailing address was outside region – increased from 21.8% to 29.9% of all titles from 2001 to 2008. On residential property titles only, non resident ownership in 2008 ranged from 13% for single family dwelling properties to 14% on acreage properties to 66% in strata titles, especially in the ski resort and Windermere Lake areas.

In some of the higher amenity rich areas, non-resident ownership was much higher – 60% in the Radium Windermere area, over 40% in the Boundary, Slocan/Arrow Lakes and Kaslo regions, and over 33% in the Valemount and Elk Valley areas. Although these areas saw development over this period, they saw little population growth. In some cases, despite development and construction activity, communities experienced decline in permanent residents.

Non-resident ownership of undeveloped land is even higher. In the Columbia Basin Trust and Boundary regions in 2008 there were 12,544 titles assessed as vacant residential and 7,186 titles assessed as vacant acreage lots 2 acres or larger. Non resident ownership of these titles was approximately 50% across the region and 60% in the 6 higher amenity areas noted above.

What does all that mean for communities and planning? There are far more questions than answers. For example, what does it mean to have 50% to 60% of the residential development potential owned by people who don’t live in the region? I suspect it means opportunities for development of housing on those lands that focuses on the needs of the regional housing market and communities is very limited. I also assume that most of those owners have not taken the time to get involved in local planning processes, and may have very different ideas about the future of their properties than the community, so there will be lots of future challenges managing development applications.

Beyond the short term benefits of the construction phase, if the growth trend in non-resident ownership continues, what will the future of these areas look like? How does non-resident ownership result in an economic base, jobs, and in a functioning volunteer sector that provides some basic services such as fire protection? And 15 years down the road, with an aging population, who will be interested in owning these properties, especially the fractional ownership strata titles for example?

The recent economic downturn has added another set of questions to the value of amenity migration based development. The fragility of this economic development strategy has become quickly and dramatically very apparent: residential building permits virtually disappeared in the resort areas in the first 3 months of this year. What will construction related employment figures look for 2009? How will the permanent resident population deal with inflated property taxes now that the boom of recent years appears to have busted, at least in the short term?

The biggest question for me, however, has to do with the vision for the future of these communities. Has that future of this part of BC already been “sold” to those folks in Alberta, the lower mainland, and other parts of BC who own such a big piece of this region, but who do not play a part in the year-round lived experience of these communities?

– 30 –

About the author:

GEORGE PENFOLD is Regional Innovation Chair (RIC) in Rural Economic Development at Selkirk College in Castlegar, BC and Adjunct Professor at theSchool of Business and Economics at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC. InReal Estate Foundation contributed $100,000 to the RIC endowment fund at Selkirk College as part of its support for sustainable community planning and informed development in the greater Kootenay region.


©Real Estate Foundation of BC/ 2009. We encourage the reproduction of articles on this website non-profit educational purposes. Please notify the Foundation and the author of all reproductions, including in-house uses.

normal