bcbusiness.ca may 2014 BCBusiness 53
on this road; let's get some land avail-
able so we can take advantage of it."
There is, of course, another side
to the argument. Agricultural propo-
nents say that preserving farmland
close to urban populations is more
than a question of enjoying the luxury
of local tomatoes, but is an essential
hedge against dependence on cheap
imported food. It's a view that reso-
nates with the public: the impacts of
rising energy costs and climate change
will converge and conspire to make
local agriculture a necessity, they say—
provided we still have the land. "We
established the B.C. Agricultural Land
Reserve in 1973 to avoid a future food
crisis," wrote Harold Steves, a farmer,
Richmond city councillor and former
NDP MLA who helped create the ALR,
in a recent editorial. "That crisis has
arrived."
T
he best solution to scarcity of
industrial land lies in using our
existing industrial space better,
says Burnaby mayor Derrick
Corrigan. "The old idea that it is for
vast parking lots on acres of land, just
isn't acceptable," he says. "We have
to have more intensive uses of those
industrial lands and we have to be
more aggressive to be sure we're maxi-
mizing the use."
In the past, Corrigan says, indus-
trial land owners and developers have
been more than happy to "up-zone"
industrial land to commercial and resi-
dential use for fat profits. "Taking land
out of the
ALR is a massive temptation,
and the biggest profit to be made is
by developers in changing the use of
land," Corrigan says. Now some are
trumpeting an industrial land crisis in
hopes of cashing in again, he alleges.
(Metro Vancouver statistics appear
to support that "up-zoning" does
occur: Metro Vancouver reports that
between July 2011 and December 2013
about 40 hectares of industrial land
were lost to other uses.)
The solution to the growing creep
of industry onto agricultural land is
in some ways similar to the "smart
growth" approach to densifying
urban cores to maximize efficient use
of space on residential land, as seen in
Vancouver. What proponents refer to
p48-54_IndRealEstate_may.indd 53 2014-04-15 12:38 PM
