A colleague of mine was at the recent North College Park exploratory bulldozing kerfuffle meeting, which led to an interesting discussion that we had at work the next day.
The consensus among the people that were at the meeting, and the people in my office the next morning was this: why is the City of Prince George, and city developers continuously trying to build new neighbourhoods in our city when we have an urban sprawl problem as it is? It takes a minimum of thirty minutes to go from the end of the Hart Highway to the end of College Heights.
I had thought that the cities of the future were trying to focus on urban development and density in urban spaces to increase livability, decrease a carbon footprint, to maintain our greenspaces and to increase community spirit. We are not lacking houses in Prince George, but we are lacking livable homes. There are many neighbourhoods in the city that have abandoned buildings, shacks, and derelict spaces that are ripe for a developer to come in and swoop in to add increased value to the neighbourhood.
There are entire neighbourhoods in the Hart Highway that have a small 40-year-old trailers sitting on an acre or a half-acre lots, in the city.
If a person were smart, they would be scooping up these older properties when they came on the market and building reasonable sized homes for middle class families. The new neighbourhood houses, from what I have seen, are monstrously huge, beautiful, homes that look virtually identical to their houses next door.
For me, massive houses are a detriment when it comes to buying a house. More house equals more housecleaning and I don't make enough money to afford to hire a housekeeper to do it for me. What on earth would I do with six bedrooms, two living rooms and four bathrooms?
I would have to quit my job just to have the time to vacuum. I would much rather have a smaller, renovated home that was close to a city park (sans uprooted trees) that had wonderful neighbours who helped plow your driveway (thanks, neighbours).
Without notice, a large billboard sign was placed in our neighbourhood a few months ago advertising a "brand-new development opportunity" including options for sand, gravel and tree extraction for the low, low price of $4 million in addition to up to 400 or so city-lots for the savvy developer. Considering that our house backs onto a very sharp hill and behind the hill is, what I thought was, Crown land greenspace, we were quite concerned with the thought of a sand pit moving in down the street. After much discussion, my husband and I are ignoring this for the time being.
It is far easier, and cheaper for a developer to buy up unused green property than it is for a developer to revamp older homes. I would like to see us taking pride in our city and cleaning up the neighbourhoods that we have before we eliminate the greenspaces surrounding us.
The greenspaces and parks in our neighbourhoods are what makes Prince George such an amazing place to live.
