Milt Bowling has lived long enough in Southeast Vancouver to remember the tramcars. From the south end of Kerr Road overlooking the Fraser River, he and other young boys would hop onto the locomotives for a ride to New Westminster to watch lacrosse.

A few years ago, another reminder of the olden days in the community—the Canadian White Pine Mill—shut down. The 52.6-hectare site that the mill used to occupy, from south of Marine Way and east of Kerr to Boundary Road, remains zoned as industrial land, but not for long.

On June 14, the Vancouver city council received from staff an update about the application by the land’s new owners, ParkLane Homes/WesGroup Income Properties, to rezone almost half of the area. Covering 20.9 hectares, the application seeks to create a network of new streets, residential blocks, commercial areas, and parks. It is the first and largest phase of a multistage development on what could be one of the last of the city’s biggest waterfront parcels. The new community is to be built over a period of 25 years.

“It’s going to impact Southeast Vancouver,” Bowling told the Georgia Straight. “It’s going to be 13,000 people living there. How many towns in B.C. have 13,000 people?”

Bowling is vice chair of a citizens’ committee that is following the implementation of the project. “We just want to make sure that what’s on paper gets put on dirt,” he said.

So far, Bowling noted, features of the project have been consistent with what the City of Vancouver approved as a sustainable and walkable community. A 30,000-square-foot community centre, an elementary school, and a secondary school will be put up as well as two child-care centres. No big-box store is going up, but there will be a grocery store and a drug store.

Social housing is a component of the application, says Daniel Sirois, the city’s project planner for East Fraserlands. Some 3.3 million square feet of residential space will be provided and 20 percent of this will be for affordable housing. “The applicant has proposed a strategy for the location of affordable housing units,” Sirois told the Straight. “We’re still working out the details.”

Although the plan envisions a community where residents can live, work, learn, and shop, transportation to and from the area is one concern. ParkLane Homes vice president Norm Shearing told the Straight that the firm is working with TransLink to develop new bus routes. “There would be enough people living there as well as the people that are underserviced in West Fraserlands to more than justify one or two bus routes,” he said.

Sales of the residential units for the first phase of the project will begin in 2008, according to Shearing’s colleague and development manager Merula C.B. de Wit. Construction of the first buildings starts in 2009, with completion eyed in 2011.

On November 14, 2006, the City of Vancouver approved the official development plan for East Fraserlands. Last June, the Canadian Institute of Planners gave the city an award for planning excellence, lauding the project as “an exceptional neighborhood plan”¦for transforming one of the city’s last major brownfield sites into a complete and compact, mixed use, sustainable community”.

Vision councillor Heather Deal pointed out to the Straight that input from citizens in nearby neighbourhoods resulted in a “huge improvement” in the designs made by the developer. These include two sports fields, habitats for salmon and songbirds, and even two little islands for biodiversity. “It is one of the best examples I’ve seen of what community participation can do in terms of positive change,” Deal said.

Also last June, ParkLane Homes won an award for best development proposal from Smart Growth BC, a nonprofit group dedicated to fiscal, social, and environmentally sound land use and development. “They’re providing housing and jobs in proximity to each other,” Cheeying Ho, executive director of Smart Growth BC, explained to the Straight. “That follows smart growth.”

Ho noted that the “plan sounds very good so far”, but that’s no reason to be complacent. “Often the challenges are the plans look really good and when the development applications come forward to city council, with construction prices so high today, sometimes developers start cutting corners and omitting some value-added pieces of the development,” she said.