I've always maintained that neighborhoods should ultimately be controlled by the people who actually live in those neighborhoods, not people that don't live in the neighborhoods ... or may not yet even live in Victoria ... it just seems like the decent thing to do.
It's always the "have-nots" that want to take a little of what the "haves" have already got ... I get that - but that industrial land in the North end of town isn't quite as valuable as you propose it might be, and it would make an awfully nice place to live ... as the folks in and around the Victoria Public Market could tell you ... soon to be folks all the way out to Uptown.
I don't know how long you've lived in Victoria, but the locations you mentioned as absorbing the regions growth over the last decade or so were Victoria's low rent, less privileged neighborhoods in decades past.
When I was a kid, James Bay and Vic West were basically considered slums ... as a Gordon Head kid, we were told never to venture into either of one of them.
Development tends to work that way ... the nice places stay nice places ... and the less-nice places and industrial lands tend to get gentrified with the aim of eventually making them "nice places" too.
I support that general line of thinking as it pertains to development, and find it fair to residents who already live in old neighborhoods ... but I'm quite clear that many folks who would like to live in Fairfield, Gonzales, Rockland and other established neighborhoods don't support it, and feel that they have every right to demand a 14 story residential tower that they can buy a condo in be built on any given block in Fairfield ... mixed in among houses that have stood where they are for, in some cases, 100+ years (a formula that eventually gives you Vancouver's West End).
Underlying all of this is that, in my 61 years here in Victoria there's really never been anything at all that one could call mass development of affordable housing.
Even in the early 60's, folks who wanted to live here because of the weather and lifestyle put local property values far above similar property values in other cities and towns in B.C. ... and that ratio has never really changed even as the years turn into decades.
An example would be that my dad built a house out Glanford way in 1955 for $7000.00 (inc. property purchase), when he could have done the same thing elsewhere in the province for $3000.00 or $4000.00 --- literally half the cost.
Victoria has always only been affordable "now" only for those who purchased houses or condo's way back "then" -- a statement that rings true (without modification) if theoretically spoken at any point in the last 60 years ... and I don't expect any sort of development short of mass development of the Westshore would ever change that.
Edited by Cassidy, 21 June 2018 - 02:16 PM.