I flew over Surrey on GoogleEarth looking for something that didn’t look right. I settled on a subdivision of small lots with the following characteristic:

Small homes spaced 32-feet apart on the rear side.

Shopping malls are typically 33 feet wide (store front to store front) for reasons of fire fighting equipment access. I don’t know if this is at the bottom of what I am seeing, I am just reporting on a “coincidence” in dimension.

So, for sakes of space, let’s try to understand what this means in housing. In this case, the rear yard is 16-feet deep; then, a fence; then a yard as deep as two sheets of plywood laid end to end (16 feet long); then the next house. How to explain this?

Imagine we have just pulled into a shopping center parking lot and stopped our car in front of another car parked in front of us.

If, rather than sitting in a parking lot, we were sitting in one of these houses looking out over the back yard, then the situation would be as follows. The first house would have its rear wall built tight against the back our mid-size car’s trunk; the fence would be erected between the front of our car and the front of the car facing us; and the rear side neighbour’s back wall would be built hard against the rear bumper of the car in front of us.

In the space of two cars parked front-to-front, this Surrey-approved subdivision parks two family homes.

I call the distance separating the windows of one home from the windows of the home opposite, the “Decency Index”.

I hold that any separation less than 70 feet—is “indecent”. At separations less than that, the particulars of everyday life in my home become common knowledge in my neighbour’s house hold, and vice versa.

The City of Surrey stands as the “Authority Having Jurisdiction”, or the professional overseers that, in my opinion, got this basic element of human decency wrong by 220%.

Michael Geller, I think what we’ve got here is a flock of developers that “make wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing” look like damn fools. I hope that’s made Urbanismo take notice.

Many crimes have been perpetrated in the name of affordable housing, and real estate profits. However, that doesn’t mean we have to turn a blind eye when the “second sister”—are we channelling “Cinderella here?—steps up to claim her due public recognition.

I admit, I am not familiar with all of Surrey’s major thoroughfares, but I cycled through there fairly regularly, usually experimenting with new routes, and I don’t see how the “scale of the roads could be further reduced with landscaped central medians” can be achieved to any significant degree when there simply isn’t room. Many of these thoroughfares were likely old dirt roads at one time, for which the city did not obtain rights of way for future widening, but allowed development to happen right up to the edge of the sidewalk (sidewalks that are them selves laid right against the traffic lanes). In fact, some of them are so bad that I’m not sure you could lines the roads with trees without either removing a traffic lane from each side, or making the sidewalks too narrow for safe and comfortable use.

I believe that a major, and I mean major, rethinking of the transportation network in Surrey would be required to correct the flaws of the past that will prevent Surrey from becoming much more than it is now, groovy architecture notwithstanding. The likelihood of that rethinking in any meaningfully effective way seems unlikely.

I will be very happy to be proven wrong on that, for if it can happen in suburban-sprawl, car-mad Surrey, it could happen in any other metro community. But I won’t be holding my breath.

Slutty doesn’t come close to describing Vancouver ‘proper’s’ forgotten sister… Take it easy on Surrey. Give it a chance to make something and in the meantime, stop making the smart, educated, people who live there feel badly about where they choose to live. There is nothing wrong with a young family, moving to the suburb of Surrey so that they can provide a happy, healthy life for their children that they wouldn’t be able to afford in Vancouver.

Shame on you all who thing your too good to step foot in Surrey.

Admittedly I spend little time in North and central Surrey; they give me the horrors. Most of my time in South Surrey, where there are still large tracts of farmland and second-growth forest. This has the unfortunate effect of making the ongoing tsunami of unchecked development even more apparent; those fields and forests are shrinking almost daily as the malls and condos grow by leaps and bounds. It’s still an overwhlemingly car-oriented city: more malls, more roads, more cul-de-sacs, more traffic. And autombile-driven densification is picking up the pace. Driving along 16th Avenue east of Highway 99, it seems like every second acreage you pass has either a “for sale” or development permit sign on it.

I know that Watts talks a good line about managed growth, Michael; for a year or so after she was elected, the Now and the News hung on her every word, and her golden mug was on their front pages in four-part colour every week. So I have a good idea of the kind of pronouncements she tends to make on Surrey’s future. What I’m saying is that actions speak louder than words, and I’ve seen little evidence of practical action in the development process in Surrey. (Perhaps I should steel myself for another visit to Whalley soon. The trauma of my last visit a decade ago has almost healed.)

I’m willing to admit that Watts may even be sincere in her stated desire for a revamped approach to development and growth. Sadly, if she is, trying to stop those long-held, typical Surrey growth patterns will be tantamount to trying to stop a runaway freight train with a butterfly net made of dental floss. I wish her luck.
gmgw

. . . of our Jamie Lerner attempts to wake this little town up, late of Barcelona, indeed I thought you were still in Europe . . .

Wanna talk Sandstone? Cable Bay? Nanaimo’s world class sprawl . . . .

Hey let’s get together . . . excuse us folks we have a bit of catching up to do . . .