It’s expensive to keep land from development
Most
West Islanders live in fully developed towns. They are not directly involved in municipal debates about what kind of urban environment they want their towns to develop into: how much residential, industrial, commercial zoning, and how much green space will be preserved. It’s already laid out, made to measure.
The current hot debates about the West Island urban landscape are going on at the end of the island.
In Senneville, it’s a question of what to do with the old Senneville Lodge, the veterans’ old living quarters, which I remember as a quaint and small-greened golf course run by a handful of veterans. I remember losing several balls in the woods by the highway at a Ste. Anne Chevaliers de Colombe golf tournament.
Any dense major residential development will seriously alter the demographic balance of the old village.
Ste. Anne de Bellevue is in political tur- moil over the latest council proposal to drop 4,000 new residents next to the Trans-Canada Highway. It’s a debate about what to do with the old farmlands of Ste. Marie, north of the Trans-Canada. The most recent proposal from Ste. Anne council would double the town’s population and dramatically compromise future industrial tax revenues by reducing the amount of land identified for industrial development.
In Beaconsfield, of course, it’s a question of what to do with Angell Woods, another place I hit (and lost) golf balls once upon a time.
In each case there is a struggle between the purest of pure Greens, who don’t really want any development, and various types of development-tolerant residents. The Greens want to raise the percentage of green space on the island of Montreal.
Groups such as the Green Coalition work with the environmentalists inside the Montreal Parks division in pursuit of a common vision of eco-preservation. These eco-warriors don’t really like suburban houses and suburban life because it eats into green space and everyone has a couple of cars, which are bad.
At one stage the vision even included a tunnel under the Trans-Canada Highway to connect the Cap St. Jacques park to Angell Woods via the l’Anse à l’Orme corridor to allow animals to migrate to and fro.
But, of course, all this land has a development value and the owners pay taxes on that developmental value. This land has owners. And although developers already have to give 10 per cent of development land for parks either in land or cash value, the only sure way to preserve land from development is for someone to buy it or to exchange for it and to give it to public authorities to designate it officially as park.
Which is why so much land is developed: It’s expensive to preserve it.
And towns need revenues to keep up with all those increases built into their collective agreements and general rising costs.
So if you can’t avoid developing the farmlands in north Ste. Anne or the old golf course in Senneville or Angell Woods, green thinking, which is in origin a city movement, favours dense development plans because that way you get more people housed for the damage you do.
People living in our end-of-the-island communities traded in city life for a more tranquil lifestyle and more intimate communities. Does a dense development deliver this?
High-density housing is a form of development that works in cities, not in more settled, stable suburban villages. High-density development must be based on effective public transport. Our “development” communities don’t have effective transport.
High-density communities need convenience stores, gas stations, places for adolescents to hang out. And there is one good reason why this needs a public debate: Development is irreversible.