By Alex Boston

Ensuring a sustainable future for the region of Metro Vancouver appears to be a balancing act, a delicate weighting of the costs and benefits of incongruent objectives. A regional board vote on Friday (January 28) on whether to extend the limits of the urban containment boundary and redesignate 160 hectares of forested, rural land for industrial use exemplifies this tension.

Yet the challenge we face is not how to chose between conflicting priorities, but how to shift our mindset from polarizing trade-offs toward truly sustainable solutions—ones that ensure all objectives are met through systems-thinking, creativity, and innovation.

South Campbell Heights in Surrey, B.C. is within the Little Campbell River watershed. The undeveloped portion of land is composed of second-growth forest, farmland, a salmon-spawning river, and an aquifer that serves local farms and residents. Metro Vancouver industrial land-development opportunities are important to our economy and seriously constrained. The region is under pressure to increase supply—a redesignation of South Campbell Heights, which would expand the existing North Campbell Heights industrial complex, is pitched as a considerable advantage for the region’s economy. 

However, there is no shortage of industrial land. There is a shortage of policy innovation and courage to change. The redesignation of South Campbell Heights from rural to industrial is inconsistent with many of Metro Vancouver’s goals and objectives. Converting a dwindling supply of ecologically significant land with wide-ranging negative social, financial, and economic implications for the region is simply too high a price.

Permitting further industrial expansion in South Campbell Heights is likely to undermine several other regional priorities. Beyond the impact to natural habitat, adding peripheral employment destinations in low density areas not effectively served by transit puts upward pressure on fares, and increases congestion and transportation carbon emissions from personal vehicle use.

The South Campbell Heights decision provides an opportunity for Metro Vancouver to join the ranks of world-class urban regions pursuing innovative development agendas that help solve complex issues. Rather than providing an ongoing supply of natural land, let’s give the business community the opportunity to do what they do best: innovate, test, and generate new models for prosperity.

In our geographically constrained region, we should be on the leading-edge of solutions for intensification of industrial land.

Around the world and across North America, including competing ports––cities are building multistorey warehouses. They are located on century-old industrial land proximate to strategic transportation infrastructure: major freight corridors, transit, bike, and walking infrastructure. These high-tech warehouses manage freight and employee congestion and carbon.

Campbell Heights mixed employment land has none of the characteristics. There’s untapped potential in the region to seize on these industrial and employment land solutions, ensuring that our region supports economic innovation and global competitiveness, healthy watersheds, climate-friendly urban form, short commutes, and a high quality of life.

Things of great value are often lost incrementally. With every bite out of our region’s natural areas, we lose a little more biodiversity, carbon storage, water filtration, and resilience to climate impacts, like the catastrophic flooding in 2021. With every new employment centre on the urban edge, we increase commuter traffic, congestion, and greenhouse gas emissions. We continue to slowly delay the inevitable: we need to intensify industrial activity, because our region’s land base is constrained, with or without parcels like South Campbell Heights.

Existing urban land can be reimagined and redesigned, but our natural areas and the services they provide are irreplaceable. As this ecologically sensitive land hangs in the balance, it provides an opportunity for the Metro Vancouver regional board to uphold their stated goals for the region—protecting the natural environment, reducing greenhouse gasses, increasing climate resiliency—while nudging a member jurisdiction to develop more innovative, advantageous, and sustainable solutions for ensuring economic prosperity in our region.