City's only cemetery to provide 6,200 new spaces for remains
When you run out of room on the ground, you build up — whether it's an apartment building for the living, or spaces for the deceased.
At Mountain View, Vancouver's only cemetery, about 80 per cent of the remains today are cremated, and the city-owned memorial grounds is beginning to add 6,200 spaces to accommodate future cremations, says a report to council from the city department of arts, culture and community services.
“The Vancouver equivalent, I guess, of condominiums for cremated remains,” said Glen Hodges, manager at Mountain View. “Columbaria will be the bulk of those new spaces.”
There are more than 150,000 sets of human remains at Mountain View. The first burial was in 1887 and the grounds — which cover an area of more than 40 city blocks — have been full for a long time, meaning more room is needed above ground.
The cemetery sold no spaces between 1996 and 2008 because it was full prior to new columbaria construction during the first phase of a master plan that went into effect in 2009.
Vancouver is rare among Canadian cities in that more than 80 per cent of people here choose cremation — in Victoria it's 90 per cent, Hodges said. The B.C. rate is 77 per cent, the highest in Canada. New Brunswick, at 33 per cent, is the lowest, according to the Cremation Association of North America.
Canada's overall cremation rate of 72 per cent is a lot higher than that of the U.S. — 53 per cent — but well back of Japan's cremation rate of 99.97 per cent, according to the World Population Review.
“(B.C.) has had the highest cremation rate in North America for probably more than 40 years,” Hodges said. “There's still a strong … depending mostly on religious background … a strong demand from folks for casket burial, but we just don't have the space.”
To say burials are no longer allowed because there is no more underground space left isn't entirely accurate. Families may reuse gravesites for additional burials.
“We're in our 137th year. For some families, especially because there aren't a lot of cemeteries and the cost of buying a new plot is very expensive, a family can come to our cemetery, which maybe they haven't used for a generation or two, but they've got grandparents or even great-grandparents (interred at Mountain View). They can still have a full-casket burial here for less than the cost of digging a new grave at any cemetery in Metro,” Hodges said. “And you're buried in the same grave as your family member, not just somewhere in the cemetery.”
For the first four decades of its existence, Mountain View relied on families or gardeners to tend to graves, with no official maintenance other than cutting tall grass, according to the report to council.
It wasn't until 1933 that a care fund was set up under the auspices of a cemetery perpetual maintenance bylaw. Interest from onetime payments by grave owners was meant to cover site maintenance, but 30,000 already existing graves had contributed nothing into the fund. It's those never-collected fees the master plan is aimed at recovering, only it's going to take more time than originally thought.
In 1964, with space in the original cemetery layout running out, fewer than 15 per cent of graves were under care and maintenance, while the one-time fee of $40 had not risen since 1933.
Joining the fund became mandatory, and the fee was finally hiked to $110 in 1981.
By 1986, space was running out again and the cemetery quit selling plots, leading eventually to today's six-phase master plan.
Sales resumed in 2009 with the implementation of Phase 1, but revenues were far short of projected.
A revised financial model for Phase 2 has upped the amount of time it will take to recoup costs of operating the cemetery with negligible care or maintenance contributions from families.
The report says the first phase “confirms” it will take several decades for a market-rate structure of cemetery fees to make up for decades of little or no care and maintenance contributions from families.
“For the first 80 years of the cemetery there was almost no money put away to fund that expense. It gets burdened to the ratepayers,” Hodges said. “We were hoping we'd be able in the first phase to generate enough revenue to build up that care fund to cover that three, four generations of underfunding.”
For the first 80 years of the cemetery there was almost no money put away.