One last sprawl: Why the McKee Peak plan exists

Abbotsford Council was set to vote next week on the controversial McKee Peak plan. Now it won’t, after the city discovered what it called a ‘procedural error’ that would require it to repeat the entire council process in order to adopt the plan. The city issued a release Thursday, which you can read here.

The decision, though, comes after a public hearing in which a Semá:th First Nation official declared that the city had failed in its duty to consult with the First Nation. Richard Hall, the Semá:th director of governance and natural resources, said he had only had two meetings with planners early in 2022 and had not discussed the matter with city hall since then. You can watch Hall’s statement to council here.

“This is the traditional territory of the Semá:th peoples,” he said during the meeting. Hall (who casually noted that he is a practising lawyer) pointed out that municipalities are bound by provincial legislation governing how cities must consult First Nations. “It’s the responsibility of every municipality in the province to respect both UNDRIP and DRIPA. From Sema:th’s perspective that has not happened in this case in any shape or form. For traditional territory developments to take place, First Nations need to have a collaborative decision-making role going forward, and that’s not what is happening here.”

Hall said Semá:th and the city have collaborated well on a variety of other projects, including those regarding river bank stabilization and flood mitigation measures, and suggested they could work together on the McKee matter. But he urged the city to defer any future decision. Whether or not Hall’s comments prompted the rescinding of the plan may be clearer on Monday, when council will discuss what comes next. But the city will be aware that only a couple years ago, Semá:th sued it for a lack of consultation when it moved to expropriate land next to a burial ground.

UPDATE: The agenda for the March 27 meeting says the issue involved the duplication of an incorrect set of motions when council adopted the first and second readings of the plan in January. Those errors will force the plan to be re-introduced. The Semá:th concerns remain.

The consultation concerns are only the latest in a series of hurdles faced by a plan with plenty of opponents and relatively little enthusiastic support. Which prompts the question: why does the plan exists in the first place? The answer to that, though, requires diving into a decades-old promise, a compromise made in 2016, and a balancing act by recreational users who love trails built on private property.

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Sprawl was out. Infill was in.

It was 2015 and anyone loitering at Abbotsford City Hall would likely hear a recurring theme: building thousands of family homes on a hillside miles from the city’s centre is inefficient, expensive, and a bad way to grow.

Abbotsford needed to rethink how it grew. And so it did, hiring planners, striking committees, consulting with the public over and over again. They called the process “Abbotsforward,” and the city eventually came up with a new plan focused on ending Abbotsford’s reliance on sprawl. Everybody seemed to love it.

But nobody really talked about a piece of the plan largely at odds with everything that surrounded it. That piece—one last recipe for one last sprawl—would lead to the McKee Peak Neighbourhood Plan and a raging debate about the city’s growth and evolution.

It would also, inevitably, lead some to wonder: what’s the point of all this? And how will the average resident today benefit from more suburbs on Sumas Mountain?

To answer those questions, you need to go back even further, to the years after the formation of the City of Abbotsford—the municipality, not the geographical place—when one generation of city officials made a decision that two decades later would decide was impossible to reverse.

The first decision

The first thing to realize is that the current discussions about the McKee Neighbourhood Plan are taking place largely about two entirely different subjects.

But for most Abbotsford city staff and politicians, the decision to develop thousands of hectares on the lower reaches of Sumas Mountain was decided years or even decades ago. They have repeatedly noted that the McKee Plan is a requirement set out by Abbotsford’s much-praised official community plan. And so they have tried to focus on how the area will be developed over the coming years—not whether or not it will be.

Last year, when council first evaluated the new plan, Coun. Ross Siemens—now Abbotsford’s mayor—gave his thoughts on the plan’s goals:.

“What we are trying to do now is develop a cohesive and functioning neighbourhood that is going to be a major part of our city,” said Siemens, who was elected Abbotsford’s mayor last year. “In the future, 25% of our growth will be in this area.”

But while their politicians have been largely uninterested in reconsidering the fundamental question as to whether development on the peak is desired, residents have been less circumspect.

Since a draft of the plan first came to council a year ago, many residents and trail users have criticized further development on Sumas Mountain, expressing concerns about the effects on vulnerable natural habitats and well-used trails in the area.

Many of those residents either would have been children, or didn’t live in Abbotsford, when the first preliminary development plans for the area were sketched out decades ago. The ideas at the time about how a Fraser Valley city should grow and evolve are very different today. And yet, since the first decision was made, successive city governments deferred to the original concept.

It has always been possible to reverse those old McKee development plans. But doing so could trigger unwelcome and potentially costly political (and, maybe, legal) fights, and so the matter has been treated as settled, with little discussion encouraged.

The ‘90s

Following the amalgamation of Matsqui and Abbotsford in the mid-1990s, city officials got to work sketching out what the new city would end up looking like. As part of that exercise, they set out the future borders of growth.

The border they created, the city’s “urban development boundary,” set out the limits for Abbotsford’s future growth. But in doing so, the boundary and other land use mapping didn’t just set restrictive limits (i.e. ruling certain areas off limits from development). Inevitably, the border also specifically identified those areas in which city hall would welcome the construction of new subdivisions.

The general parameters of those subdivisions would still need to pass muster with council and roughly abide by various city policies. And unlimited density wouldn’t be allowed. But you didn’t need a crystal ball to know which way the winds blew.

In the city’s 1996 land use plan, that border enclosed a broad undeveloped swath of the McKee Peak area within Abbotsford’s development area. As such, it was coloured yellow, meaning city policy would generally permit new single-family homes to be built in the area. A decade later, Abbotsford completed another plan and maintained roughly the same designations in place.

So when the city again began considering the creation of its current Official Community Plan in the mid-2010s, the idea that McKee Peak would be developed was firmly in place as planners once again considered the future of Abbotsford.

Enter Toderian

In 2014, as Abbotsford geared up to create a new official community plan, it hired a well-known city planner named Brent Toderian to lead the process. Toderian was a former City of Vancouver head planner who had made a name for himself as BC’s most prominent and vocal advocate of the need for communities to densify and reduce their residents’ dependency on their vehicles.

A key part of building denser, more efficient communities, was focusing development in established city cores. That would allow for better transit, walking, and cycling options. It would also be more efficient, with municipalities spending less, per person, maintaining infrastructure like water and sewer pipes.

“Cities are doing the math about how much sprawl actually costs, compared to infill, and how important it is to all your taxes,” Toderian would later say. “Some cities [are] potentially literally going bankrupt because they can’t handle the ongoing costs of dumb development.”

One estimate held that for every tax dollar raised, it cost about $1.50 to provide services to houses in sprawling, low-density suburbs.

The urban planning philosophy preached by Toderian would be a departure from the haphazard build-now-ask-questions-later way that Abbotsford had developed over the preceding 40 years. That was by design. Abbotsford had run out of easily developable land and running roads and utility pipes up Sumas Mountain to accommodate growth was increasingly expensive and inefficient. The status quo couldn’t continue.

The Official Community Plan the city would develop and pass to great fanfare would guide Abbotsford’s growth from a city of 140,000 people to one with 200,000 residents. And it would emphasize one specific number over all others: 75%.

New homes would need to be built, but the plan said that 75% of new buildings should be constructed in existing neighbourhoods on lots that had been developed before. In most Fraser Valley and Western Canadian communities, the bulk of new buildings constructed in the last 40 years had gone up on previously undeveloped land, either on hillsides or valley bottoms. Abbotsford’s OCP would reverse that equation.

Instead of chopping down trees or building over wetlands, the city’s housing stock would primarily grow as lots with single homes were split to accommodate two or three houses or, sometimes, townhouse complexes and apartment buildings.

The citywide plan received wide acclaim and little local criticism. It won a variety of planning awards and Toderian, city planners, and council itself were hailed for their visionary reimagination of what Abbotsford was and could be.

“Abbotsford rethinks its future,” a Vancouver Sun headline blared.

“New Community Plan to Remake Canada's Capital of Sprawl,” an urban planning publication proclaimed.

Almost all the focus was on that 75% of infill development and the 45,000 residents who would live in existing neighbourhoods. There wasn’t much discussion about the other 15,000 people. The plan received vanishingly little criticism, especially given its impact and scope. At least at the time. But within it, the plan contained a contradiction borne of compromise that would eventually prompt questions.

New neighbourhoods

Suburbs are largely (though not always) to be avoided, when possible. But planners are also realistic. Their visions require the sign-off of politicians and, tacitly, the residents who elect them. If a city has room along its fringes to grow outwards, it will almost inevitably do so.

Still, in Abbotsford city hall, if not the public at large, there was internal discussion about that 25% of “greenfield” development.

Given that almost every single piece of undeveloped land in Abbotsford is either in the Agricultural Land Reserve or on Sumas Mountain, if homes for 15,000 people were to go up on undeveloped land, they would inevitably be built on McKee Peak, in that same area identified in those two proceeding plans. (The new OCP would designate this area as “new neighbourhoods.”)

Toderian and others have stressed that not all suburbs are inherently bad. They can improve a city and provide desperately needed housing—they just need to be built in a thoughtful manner to promote the use of transit, reduce the need for cars, and mitigate the cost of providing services like sewer and water pipes.

But the location of McKee Peak was far from ideal for the construction of a new community. The area is situated on a steep hill that necessitates twisting roads. The area isn’t near any major transit corridors or hubs, and most future residents would need to use cars to get to work, shopping locations, and other amenities. A good neighbourhood needs its own centre, and McKee Peak’s steep slopes and winding roads guaranteed that any imagined core would be separated from the rest of the area.

But if a McKee Peak suburb wouldn’t be a planner’s dream, the rest of Abbotsford’s Official Community Plan was. So even if the new neighbourhoods weren’t perfect or even ideal, if Abbotsford city hall wanted to stick with the plan for more homes on the peak, Toderian and his crew wouldn’t walk away. A good plan was still a good plan.

The risk of a fight

When it came to McKee Peak, Abbotsford city officials either knew or should have known its drawbacks, but they had other issues on their mind. Specifically, the consequences of saying no and redrawing that decades-old development boundary.

Restricting development on the peak would have triggered a massive political and, possibly, legal fight, city officials worried. The land on McKee Peak might be mostly vacant, but it’s worth tens of millions of dollars. The minute the city declared it off limits to large subdivisions, its value would have plummeted. That, some at city hall worried, could have resulted in court cases and conflict.

And whether or not it was part of city hall’s calculation, any fight had the potential to set landowners against trail groups, and sink the governing consensus needed for council to actually follow its new Official Community Plan and steer the community in a broadly new direction.

The stakes are directly connected to the dramatic influence city planning decisions have on the fortunes of landowners.

The value of vacant land is largely linked to its development potential. The more you can build on a property, the higher the potential profits, and the more the land is worth. Even a hint that large-scale building is possible can cause a property’s value to skyrocket. This is why a couple of acres of farmland in the Agricultural Land Reserve may sell for millions of dollars, even though the land technically can only be used for farming. The value is largely based on the potential that, one day, a government will change land use rules in a way that will allow building on the land.

Even talk and rumour can increase prices. But nothing increases land values as much as when a municipality changes a property’s zoning or land-use designation.

However, the reverse is also true (though municipalities almost never downzone land). If Abbotsford were to decide to restrict development on Sumas Mountain, land prices would drop significantly.

The properties would still have speculative value, with owners betting that a future council would make a different decision. But a five-acre plot of rural land with a 50-year-old house on it is probably not likely to be valued at $7 million.

In an emailed statement to The Current, the city said no promises or commitments were made to “any individual” McKee Peak landowner. But conversations with city officials closely involved in the Official Community Plan’s creation (but not willing to be quoted) confirm that officials did consider the potential for lawsuits.

Even if no explicit commitments to individuals were made, officials felt that the city had at least implicitly committed to permitting development in the area. And having done so, they felt they could not reverse that position.

For the city, whether a developer would actually win a lawsuit would be almost beside the point. Any court case would tie up city resources, potentially cost millions to fight, and be a political nightmare.

Whereas changing the existing McKee Peak designation may have triggered a messy fight, sticking with the existing plans for the area, on the other hand, wouldn’t. So when it came time to consider the future of McKee Peak in that 2016 OCP, the city took the path of least resistance.

Development on McKee Peak might not perfectly align with the idea of a more compact Abbotsford, but it was the price to be paid for peace and consensus. Toderian and his fellow planners also accepted the trade-off. They were fiercely proud of their forward-thinking plan and the course it charted for Abbotsford.

Focusing growth internally, in existing neighbourhoods, was not only a radical departure from Abbotsford’s development history, it was also ambitious compared to much-more urban communities.

So having one-quarter (rather than, say, 75%) of upcoming growth on Sumas Mountain was seen as a victory, not a loss. If one last suburb was the price to pay for progress, it was one the city’s hired planners were willing to make.

The conversation turns

Of course, few people were having these specific conversations—especially in public—back in 2016. The focus then was on the densification, walkable neighbourhoods and a “city of centres.” That, after all, was what was so transformative of the OCP. The plans for development on Sumas Mountain were old news.

When council—including Abbotsford’s present-day mayor and four current councillors—enthusiastically and unanimously passed the OCP in 2016, the city was widely applauded and received little criticism.

Seven years later, the OCP has been broadly a success, with its core goal of having most new growth in existing neighbourhoods fulfilled beyond expectation: more than 95% of new homes have gone up in existing neighbourhoods, the city says. McKee Peak development will alter that equation some, but the ratio is likely to stay well above 3:1.

But the much-more-criticized McKee Peak plan is a direct result of that earlier citywide plan. That document carefully spelled out the need for specific neighbourhood plans in a variety of areas, including on McKee Peak. Those plans will provide precise, street-level decisions about how each area will fulfill the broader vision of the OCP.

But whereas plans for Abbotsford’s historic downtown, city centre, and university neighbourhood encountered little opposition, the McKee Peak plan has had the opposite experience.

You can view the McKee Peak plan and its draft incarnations and presentations here.

The opponents

As the city finally focused on planning out what a new McKee Peak neighbourhood would look like, two interest groups have recognized the dramatic changes it would likely bring.

The Fraser Valley Conservancy started a campaign called “speak for the peak” and called for the preservation of as much land as possible. Its goal was simple: save extremely valuable habitat on a vulnerable mountain. The area is home to vulnerable species like the phantom orchid, Oregon forest snail, pacific sideband, northern red-legged frog, mountain beaver and Pacific waterleaf. Throughout the process the conservancy’s stance has largely remained the same and is the least complicated: it’s against further development on McKee Peak.

But a faction of recreation and trail-user groups has faced a much-more complicated dilemma.

The peak is home to some of the province’s best mountain biking and hiking trails. Meticulously built and maintained by a legion of volunteers, the recreational users worried that development of the peak would either destroy trails, or leave them segmented and cut-off from one another.

They wanted the trails to remain, obviously. But the problem is that McKee Peak’s trails weren’t built on parkland. The trails (also called the Ledgeview trails) are on private land and exist because landowners have allowed them to remain. (The trail groups have themselves built a relationship with landowners in order to maintain access, with developers sponsoring the groups’ activities.)

The trails are incredibly well-used, and have only grown more popular in the last decade. Over the last year, the recreation groups have rallied their thousands of members to call for the preservation of the trails.

But while many of the users have come out opposed to any development, the groups and their leaders have walked a finer line. They are well aware that property owners can cut off access, or even destroy, the trails whenever they so please. So the groups’ leaders have struck a more conciliatory tone.

In a joint letter this month, the Fraser Valley Mountain Bikers Association, Abbotsford Trail Running Club, and Abbotsford Trail Development Society wrote that while they support the “spirit” of the plan, they have reservations about its impact on trails. One current goal is ensuring that for every metre of trail lost, a new one is built—either on the peak or in another semi-wilderness area (Downes Bowl is one possibility).

Both the city and developers have said they want to preserve as many trails as possible. The city’s plan envisions the future neighbourhood on the peak as a “recreation hub” that specifically emphasizes the proximity to nature and the bountiful trails in the area. Developers, meanwhile, will use the natural amenities of McKee Peak as a key selling point.

Planners and council members have emphasized the fact that a significant amount of the peak’s land will eventually be turned over to the city. The survival of the trails on that land would no longer be dependent on the goodwill and mood of individual property owners. Nevertheless, some trails will be lost: there’s only so much room, and much of the land to be turned over would be mountainsides with steep slopes that are unsuitable to both building, and riding bicycles. Hence the goal of replacing any trails lost with new ones elsewhere.

The grandest bargain

Even if it is adopted, the McKee Peak plan will need one more massive compromise if it is to actually reach its goals.

And it may be the most-difficult bargain of them all.

Abbotsford’s OCP was built around the idea of creating a “city of centres,” and so the McKee plan includes its own community core.

Unlike all others in Abbotsford’s OCP, the McKee neighbourhood centre hasn’t been built yet. And, crucially, its land is owned by the McKee Plan’s loudest, richest, and most vocal corporate opponent. (Also, potentially, its only corporate opponent.)

This could be a problem.

Abbotsford’s plan envisions creating a compact, Whistler-like “McKee Village” at the base of the peak and just downhill from many of the area’s trails.

The vision for the entire neighbourhood declares: “Residents and visitors will emerge from the forest on foot or bike into the McKee Village to meet up with friends, shop for daily needs, and experience a vibrant village-like setting that celebrates the mountainous landscape.”

The village would be built next to the existing Auguston subdivision. It would have the area’s densest housing, and be the focal point for the entire peak. It’s fundamental to the idea that the area will become a true neighbourhood, rather than a sprawling collective of unconnected subdivisions.

And it’s unclear whether its owner would want any part of the city’s plans.

The land is owned by Auguston Town Development Inc., the developers of the Auguston subdivision and an arm of an international conglomerate. And they don’t want to build a quaint two-block village. Instead, they have asked the city repeatedly for the ability to build high-rises and office buildings that would be home to as many as 30,000 residents, with office space for up to 18,000 workers. The current concept is called the Abbotsford Tech District.

Previously, the proponents pitched a futuristic concept called We Town. That idea was rejected by Abbotsford council because it didn’t fit the vision of the city’s OCP (in part because such huge numbers of people in that location would have demanded rethinking the entire city’s entire infrastructure plans).

The Tech District (which doubles as the name for Auguston Town Development’s lobbying endeavour) has actively campaigned against the McKee plan, which would not allow it to achieve its greatest ambitions for the land. It was the threat of lawsuit by the Tech District that led the city to yank plans last year and delay a public hearing on the concept by a year.

The Tech District’s complaints have mostly fallen on deaf ears and its interests in building a larger community than the McKee plan envisions directly conflict with the goals of those campaigning for less development, not more. But that doesn’t mean the Tech District doesn’t have its own card to play.

By simply doing nothing, the Tech District’s proponents could hobble the city’s ability to deliver on the plan’s greatest promises. The city will hope the financial rewards that would come from developing McKee Village will incentivize the Tech District’s owners to build the village or sell its land.

At the moment, the Tech District plans to ask the city for an OCP amendment to enable “a focused standalone process for Abbotsford Tech District.”

But reconciling the city’s McKee Village concept with the grand ambitions of an Abbotsford Tech District would require massive (and potentially impossible) compromises.

The McKee Village cannot easily be moved elsewhere on McKee Peak. The property in question is particularly valuable precisely because it’s a relatively flat parcel on a mountainside. If the two sides hit an impasse and Auguston Town Development chooses to hold on to the land, the new neighbourhood may end up even less coherent and more sprawl-oriented than the current plan imagines.

The End?

McKee Peak remains an imperfect place to build a suburb. The city will need to spend tens of millions of dollars upgrading and widening roads to the area—generally a big no-no for urbanists who say such money is better spent on transit and cycling and pedestrian infrastructure. Even its core area would be a long walk or bike ride for the vast majority of new residents. And that village centre is likely to remain a question mark long after the plan is passed.

Those fundamental issues, though, can’t be resolved in a single plan. So instead, planners focused on those details they can address and attempted to minimize the flaws of the concept and emphasize its strengths. The plan would allow for as many as 23,000 new residents—more than suggested by the OCP. That density will increase the viability of transit in the area.

The city also says the new plan, and subsequent discussions with developers, will focus on the preservation and enhancement of trail networks in the area. They point to the fact that nearly half of all land will become parkland as evidence of its environmental bona fides, and trail groups have cautiously endorsed a compromise even if their individual members have not.

And the McKee Peak plan still seemed destined for acceptance by council until Richard Hall, Semá:th First Nation’s director of governance and natural resources, stood up to the podium near the end of a marathon public hearing earlier this month.

The McKee Peak Plan had been in the works for three years.

The lands it concerns sit at the heart of the Semá:th traditional territory; the First Nation’s reserve lies just a couple kilometres away; and the McKee Peak plan itself notes that there are multiple spots of cultural interest within its borders, including a series of spectacular caves visible from the valley bottom.

Surely the city must have undertaken the necessary consultation with local First Nations before the plan went to council, right?

Apparently not, at least according to Semá:th First Nation itself. Hall’s comments that Semá:th thinks the consultation process was lacking could prompt a reconsideration of the entire project.

The plan itself says “this area is a place of deep cultural and spiritual significance” while declaring that input from First Nations has “informed” the document. But if Sema:th believe otherwise, that represents a major hurdle. For one: remember the plan is partly a byproduct of a desire not to get sued. But a lack of First Nation consultation over a delicate and important topic can quickly lead a city to the courthouse. And despite Abbotsford’s largely positive relationship with Sema:th, the First Nation sued the city over a lack of consultation just a couple years ago.

The current issues might be resolvable, Hall noted. He pointed to a series of other endeavours in which Semá:th First Nation and the City of Abbotsford have worked together. But Hall said any plan should include Sema:th as a collaborative decision-making party.

What comes next is unclear.

But for a plan built on compromises, one more will be necessary—this one requiring the city to bend—for more development on McKee Peak to ever become a reality.

The final sprawl is always the hardest.