A wise person once said if you don’t know your history, you are doomed to repeat it.
With that thought in mind, someone should review Maple Ridge’s history of commercial real estate investment for the current edition of municipal council.
Everyone, except the occupants of the rundown houses involved, cheered municipal council’s actions when, in 2011, council purchased the now vacant and forlorn properties on Selkirk Avenue between 226th and 227th Streets.
Since that time, the property has been advertised for proposal calls that council hopes will meet its pie-in-the-sky goals for the $3.7 million dollar site.
Commercial space, high-rise apartments, affordable housing, pedestrian and traffic links between Haney Place and Valley Fair, and park space are some of council’s dreams.
It reminds me of Samuel Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, in which the poet wrote,
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree;
Over the years Maple Ridge has done well with single family residential land sales but the record is terrible when it comes to commercial and industrial properties.
At the time it was conceived and developed, Haney Place Mall represented the largest real estate deal in the history of Maple Ridge. The project was intended to create a cohesive core that would enhance commercial opportunities for surrounding properties. Instead, it became an island of bricks in a sea of asphalt, relating to nothing except itself.
Haney Place Mall has been a dismal failure in light of the vision municipal council of the day had for the site. I was a member of that council and have never had much good to say about the development or its impact on business opportunities in the downtown area.
We even hired Urbanics, a well-respected consulting firm, to analyze our pet project. When it came back with a negative report, outlining the shortcomings of our plan, council ignored the consultant’s advice and plunged ahead to create the mess that has plagued our downtown core for three decades.
In short, Urbanics said the project was premature, too small in scope and should proceed only with council purchasing all the lands bounded by 224th Street to 227th Street and from Dewdney Trunk to Lougheed before proceeding with development.
The consultant warned against fragmenting the development because it would leave out parcels that would be difficult or impossible to incorporate at a later date.
Council’s failure to heed that advice led directly, or indirectly, to the subsequent legal and hugely expensive mess involved in the sale and development and later buyout of the municipal tower site, which still has vacancies.
The same council that developed Haney Place Mall then applied it economic smarts to our industrial/business park, which sometimes has more real estate signs than tenants.
Only the intercession of George Mussallem with the British Columbia Development Corporation helped Maple Ridge avert incurring a huge loss on that development.
And now council is hard at work, seeing what fiscal chaos it can create on the three-acre Selkirk Street site. And, of course, we mustn’t overlook the Albion flats fiasco, which has enjoyed the benefit of the collected fiscal acumen of successive councils and, yet, no sod turning or any other progress.
The message would be clear to a blind person – stay out of the commercial marketplace. However, much like the Bourbon rulers of ancient France, council has seen everything and learned nothing.
– Sandy Macdougall is a retired journalist and former district councillor.
