The Editor:
In response to the letter dated Jan. 2, 2024, from Brittani Di Lorenzo, I don't dispute for a second that road access and egress from Burke Mountain through Port Coquitlam needs to be fast tracked by both the Port Coquitlam and Coquitlam municipal governments, and that Coquitlam and the federal government should be responsible for the majority of these costs.
The proposed Fremont Connector should be prioritized as a critical infrastructure project and cannot continue to be ignored and delayed.
Where I do take issue, however, is with her comment that "The City of Coquitlam has overbuilt Burke Mountain….”
I’m all for wide open spaces, natural environment and agricultural land, parks and rural areas, but B.C.’s population increased by three per cent for the 12-month period ending July 1, 2023.
To put this more succinctly, in the three-month period of April, May and June of 2023, there were 52,367 new residents living in our province. With many of those new residents needing to live close to the economic epicentre of the province, where do we house these folks?
The Lower Mainland does not have an unlimited geographic area where we can sprawl and spread to just build more homes.
Our western boundary is ocean, to the south we have the U.S. border and, to the north, we have mountains. Pushing east is an option and Surrey, Langley and Abbotsford are all growing exponentially.
Of course, the Fraser Valley, Delta and South Surrey have some of the most valuable and productive farmland in Canada, which thankfully because of the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) is protected and sacrosanct.
Also, if people are going to take issue with the high cost of housing and wonder how young families are going to afford to live in the Lower Mainland, surely the answer isn't to build fewer homes.
Supply and demand (and our B.C. government) would strongly suggest that we need to accelerate the number of homes we are constructing.
Given the geographic challenges of the Lower Mainland, we definitely need to recalibrate our perspective on building, “overbuilding” and stop behaving like this is someone else's problem.
- Shawn Cody, Coquitlam
