White Rock Development: Paving Paradise
After White Rock's Official Community Plan, and its barring of any development of over nine storeys, expired, residents led by Jean Kromm fought the planned development of a 25 storey condo building till exhaustion with no avail. So why did they fail to prevent the paving of their paradise?
Divorced, raising two children alone, returning to university to complete her social-work degree, financially imperiled and often despairing about her life, Jean Kromm would walk the miles of sandy beaches when the tides rolled back in White Rock, her hometown. Out there on the dunes, in the wash of surf and seagull cries, she would find the peace and solitude of nature, and it sustained her.
Years later, after remarrying, she moved to Port Coquitlam, but living in the shadow of mountains that attracted rain and fog was not for her. She longed for the sunshine.
“Have you ever noticed,” she asks, “how the morning light starts over Mount Baker and no matter how high the sun rises in the sky, this entire area is bathed in sunshine? A few homes facing north get some shadow, but really it’s all filled with light, this entire area.”
She and her husband sacrificed money and time, she says, to live again under the big sky of leafy green White Rock. Today she spends the necessary time to make the longer commute to work. She pays White Rock’s higher taxes. She gave up 1,800 square feet of living space in Port Coquitlam for a modest 1,200-square-foot townhome where she and her husband now live comfortably, if somewhat frugally, in a park-like setting off the appropriately named Thrift Avenue.
Shortly after she returned to nature and the village ways of beachside White Rock in the late 1990s, Kromm, now 66, caught scent of a new development that would urbanize the town centre with high-rise residential towers – one topping 25 storeys. “Clusters of high-rises,” she says, “that belong in the West End, not White Rock.”
The proposed development exceeded the limits of the former Official Community Plan (OCP), which restricted heights to nine storeys before it was revised, some say without enough public input. It was also outside the limits of the Lower Mainland’s official Livable Region Strategic Plan (LRSP), which designates the town centre as a green belt.
Kromm was determined to stop what she called “this travesty.” She organized the White Rock Ratepayers Association, gathered more than 1,000 signatures on anti-development petitions and convinced hundreds of people to stand up at city meetings to rail against the project. She even got four of the city’s seven councillors in her corner against the project.
So the question is: Why did she fail?
To understand the battleground, it’s helpful to get a handle on the geography. Uptown White Rock is what out-of-town visitors drive through as they veer down the cliff to the beach, where more than 50 quirky shops and lively restaurants line Marine Drive.
The uptown looks grey and failing – empty storefronts, old folk on scooters and walkers – while Marine Drive radiates sunshine and vitality. Uptown White Rock streets have no parking meters for fear of scaring off potential retail customers, while Marine Drive has made an industry of them, collecting millions of dollars annually from state-of-the-art, computerized and cell-phone-activated meters.
For uptown commercial property owners and retailers, new threats are emerging everywhere: Southpointe, a giant new mall, has taken root 10 blocks north; Grosvenor Canada is building a super-sized Langley-style big-box mall eight blocks east; Larco Investments, the owner of West Vancouver’s Park Royal shopping centre, has announced intentions of building an upscale mixed-use residential/commercial complex even closer; and it’s generally believed the old Semiahmoo Mall will soon be redeveloped, literally across the street in Surrey.
“Without this new town centre, we’re going to be sucked dry,” says Wayne Baldwin, the City of White Rock’s 60-something, soft-spoken chief administrative officer. Baldwin was once an officer in the armed forces and holds degrees in business, engineering and science. For the town-centre project, he’s definitely the wizard behind the curtain.
Whatever economic woes have befallen White Rock’s uptown, Baldwin knows it has one undeniable asset. It is situated on the peninsula’s highest rise of land, with the lovely tidal bay below. Beyond, looming above the cloud line, is magnificent Mount Baker; far out in the dappling waters of Georgia Strait are the serene Gulf Islands; to the north and west are the snowcapped peaks of the Coastal and Golden Ears Mountains. The views are huge, spectacular and worth millions.
But Baldwin is not the only one in White Rock to appreciate the million-dollar asset, with views “that none of us are going to be able to afford,” according to Kromm.
At the first meeting called by the City of White Rock to introduce the new uptown proposal in October 2004, the developer chosen by the city, Dale Bosa, the 35-year-old VP of development for Bosa Properties, was greeted by an ambush in a rented hall. There were almost 500 people, the majority of them members of Kromm’s ratepayers association. Virtually all of them were wearing red to demonstrate their solidarity against the proposal.
So vociferous and personal were the attacks and verbal abuse that Bosa finally responded like John Merrick, the Elephant Man, declaring to the jeering crowd: “I am a human being. If you want to speak with me, I demand to be treated with respect – like any human being would!”
It was, he says later, “absolute mayhem.”
The meeting was one of many surprises Bosa encountered in the competition to develop the city’s uptown centre. The first was that nobody else was competing.
When the City of White Rock issued a request for proposals in 2004, eight development companies expressed interest, according to Baldwin. They included some of B.C.’s most serious players such as Concert and Polygon, but all but Bosa Properties balked when it came to the cost of preparing a presentation.
Developers were reluctant for two reasons. First, the RFP called for a completed proposal within 30 days (60 to 90 days is the norm). Second, and more important, White Rock is generally perceived as anti-development by the development community. The city council of the previous decade received only five major land development proposals, and turned down three of them.
But if the former city council was anti-development, the former mayor wasn’t. He feared for the financial sustainability of a community whose main source of revenue was collecting coins from parking meters. While in office from 1993 to 2001, former mayor Hardy Staub formed a task force charged with reversing the city’s anti-development attitude. The “back-room boys,” as Kromm calls them, found the solution. The key was to lower what is known in the development industry as developer cost charges, or DCC.
The DCC is what a city charges a developer per unit or per square metre to build infrastructure and provide civic amenities. It is also an indicator of the willingness of a city to co-operate with zoning and variance bylaws. Generally, the higher the DCC, the less developer-friendly a city is perceived to be. At the time, White Rock carried the second-highest developer cost charges in B.C.
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