NELSON: Save Riverview site and help the mentally ill

FACE TO FACE: Develop or protect - what to do with the Riverview Hospital lands?

Build condos on the Riverview lands? Surely, my colleague to my right jests.

Perhaps while we're at it we could slap up a Walmart and a Canadian Tire on the Colony Farm lands. There's nothing there but a few buildings, some community gardens and a few noisy birds. Let's bulldoze the sucker along with the old buildings and useless trees on the Riverview lands and build a bunch of condos. Think of the jobs we'd create!

This kind of insensitive development may make sense to my pave-paradise-put-up-a-parking-lot friend. But on this July 13, the very day the last two wards in Riverview Hospital close, let's be clear that the public will not accept the building of even one condo on the Riverview lands.

For years, conservationists, in anticipation of this day, have been establishing committees to save the land from developers. Botanists, armed with lists of the 71 genuses, 158 species and 113 varieties of trees gracing the Riverview grounds, are dug in to protect this sacred arboretum.

Even developers who have circled the billion-dollar property like buzzards know community resistance to development is unassailable.

And we've already, over the years, released 750 of Riverview's original 1,000 acres for real estate development - enough already.

So what, now, for Riverview?

Port Coquitlam MLA Mike Farnworth has it right. Declare that the Riverview lands will remain publicly owned: a public heritage site, botanical reserve and the future site of a modern, integrated, mental health care hub.

Closing Riverview Hospital was the right thing to do. Its big buildings were as 19th century as the idea of isolating mentally challenged people in institutional warehouses.

And yet Metro Vancouver's need for modern mental health care services has never been more glaring than it is today.

That's because when we quite appropriately closed Riverview, we neglected the second part of the plan: to develop integrated and localized approaches to mental health care. Too often, this neglect has resulted in those needing care ending up on the streets.

While we publicly redevelop Riverview to fulfill this need for a regional mental health care hub, we should erect informational signs, explaining the 99-year history of Riverview and describing the exotic trees among which one ambles on one's way to the public picnic area.

Face to Face columnist Jim Nelson is a retired Tri-City teacher and principal who lives in Port Moody. He has contributed a number of columns on education-related issues to The Tri-City News.