Barry Boyce,
Quality of Life
IN 1966, WHEN The Mamas and The Papas’ California Dreamin’ was topping the charts, if you didn’t live there already, you thought about how cool it would be if you could.
Indeed, in those days, and for more than a century before – since the gold rush of 1849 – California was a true paradise. Today, you can still glimpse the dream, but the coastal paradise it once was is vastly diminished by low-density housing development and a mind-boggling level of automobile traffic.
When California filled up, people moved to less populated states like Colorado. At first the influx was welcomed, but then the resulting sprawl became known as Californication. It’s ironic, people thought, that the economic prosperity they longed for changed forever the place they had known.
It’s ironic that back in California, Disney has opened a theme park called California that presents the dream and not the reality of urban sprawl and environmental deterioration.
Haligonians already live in a natural paradise. When people come from away, they marvel at the amount of open space within and so close to the city. Our tourism literature brags about it, and it’s why many people call this home.
It’s also the reason why people all across Halifax Regional Municipality have been trying to create a greenbelt/urban boundary without even calling it that.
They’re beginning to see the early symptoms of Californication coming with our growing prosperity. Part of the lovely wild granite barren at Prospect High Head has been sold to be developed into large oceanfront properties. Next door at Kelly’s Point, such a development is already underway.
The Kingswood subdivision contains approximately 800 homes on 800 hectares, classic low-density housing. The same people who plowed right up to Hemlock Ravine are poised to develop Colpitt Lake.
There is still an enormous amount of Crown land within the Halifax region, but much of it has been clear-cut and much of it is available for all kinds of development.
Strong in-migration has caused some extraordinary population increases in the past three years and an over-heated housing market to match it. HRM planners project about six percent population growth in the next decade, taking HRM to about 380,000 people.
If Halifax continues to be considered a popular relocation and retirement destination, then these figures could be much higher.
It’s true Halifax Regional Municipality is a far cry from California; it will be a long time before we face the growth that paved over California’s paradise. That’s why the sprawl issue is important now, because we still have time.
There’s no shortage of people who would like to see the natural beauty and the rugged identity of this area preserved. But the agencies that deal with these matters are understaffed.
The Environment Department group that oversees the province’s existing 31 protected areas (not to mention the one’s proposed on the map) has only nine staff members. The municipal planning department is responsible for 18 distinct planning strategies and a handful of sub-strategies, spread across three different offices. From 1998 to 2000, they approved more than 5,000 subdivision lots, not to mention commercial activity. There are 18 planners. They are overwhelmed.
That’s where the public comes in. In the end, we are the masters of our destiny. We need to show government that there is a quality-of-life constituency. We need to create something we might call the Halifax Greenspace Compact, to encourage the marriage of community and wilderness, which is at the very heart of this strange new beast called HRM.
Californians would love to turn the clock back 35 years, to when everyone was singing California Dreamin’, and change the dream. We are more fortunate. We still live in a coastal paradise.
We still have a chance to dream a new dream.
We don’t have to rely on a theme park to tell us who we are.