Moving eastwards and eastwards for lifestyle and sense of community.

I was born and raised in New Westminster, in a time where New Westminster was a bedroom community of Vancouver and Skytrain was not even in the most far-reaching futurist's thoughts. It was a busy community but had a sense of identity with families attending festivals and events and knowing their neighborhoods. The regions were built on the concept of families and jobs being reasonably close by. Workers seldom had multiple-hour daily commutes. Greenspace was plentiful, even if it was not a park, it was vacant or undeveloped areas that held natural buffers to the hectic pace of daily life. Development was allowed to grow virtually unchecked until the ALR was brought in to conserve farmland and halt the rubberstamping of almost any development proposed. Through all this the concept developed of densification. A wonderful idea that if implemented well, should in theory free up room for community spaces. However, the densification in the case of New Westminster was not well thought out, in return for developer's fees, the city grew vertically, without any amenities and with no thought as to the after-effects. People were packed in like lemmings and with that, cars, visitors, visitors cars and more and more people. Naturally, they build in space for residents' cars in the buildings but imagine hundreds of units and the potential for all the added crowds when friends drove over to visit . Each visitor looking for a parking spot, finding none as the developers and city either did not care or didn't consider it. Spillover went into single-family neighborhoods or wherever a spot to park could be found. Then Skytrain came in, and the commuters were looking for park and ride facilities, where there were few in any . They would park anywhere they could near a bus stop and hop on a bus to get to the station. Residents were greeted by lines of cars on their streets, sometimes creeping over into driveways. Eventually, urban sprawl resulted in New Westminster becoming the parking lot of the lower mainland . I moved my family to Maple Ridge to get away. Life was going well until I saw Maple Ridge start copying the master plan so sadly dropped on New Westminster . I then came to Mission. Here, a sense of community still persists. I can enjoy going out and visiting the local shops without having to listen to a traffic report to plan my route. I can see valleys and mountains without having to circle around high rises and driving to a viewpoint in some select park. I hope that the people here don't follow Maple Ridge and New Westminster in their OCP . We still have a chance to build smartly, creatively, and with an eye to keeping nature close to our hearts.