Two decades of change: small towns

This is one of a series of articles using satellite imagery to chart the changing face of Fraser Valley communities—and the land on which they sit.

Previously: Abbotsford | Langley | Mission | Chilliwack

If you want to learn about how to use online tools to explore changes across the Fraser Valley, please become an Insider Member. When the series concludes, Tyler will give members a step-by-step guide to how they can use the same techniques to survey changes in their neighbourhood, or across the world. Become an insider here.

The Fraser Valley’s small communities have a fraction of the population of their larger neighbours. And yet many of them have seen even more transformative changes over the past two decades. Each has changed in their own unique ways, sometimes at the hands of man, sometimes at the whim of Mother Nature.

Hope

Hope’s town centre has changed, certainly. But like many compact small communities where the financial might of big development projects has yet to exert itself, many of those changes are only seen from the ground or at the community’s edges.

In Hope, one of the fastest-changing areas is in Silver Creek, just to the west of the town centre. The image below shows several dramatic changes in just a dozen years. The two biggest, on the left side of the image, revolve around the area’s proximity to Highway 1. The Flying J Travel Centre and its even-newer competitor on the south side of the highway aim to grab a slice of the traveller dollars that have traditionally been focused in the centre of town.

Elsewhere in the Silver Creek area, new industrial buildings can be seen on the southeast edge, while the changes in the top-right include a new residential neighbourhood and temporary modular buildings used during pipeline construction.

Within Hope, the most obvious change has come to the Hope Golf Club, which sustained major damage during the 2021 flood. The image shows how a shift in the Coquihalla River dumped huge amounts of sand on the course, while dramatically reducing golfers’ room for error on one fairway.

Agassiz

Agassiz is a small town, but its changes in the past 20 years can almost function as a stand in for those seen all across the region. In the top-right of the image above, you can see significant industrial developments. The bottom left and bottom right show major improvements to agriculture businesses. In the centre of town, subdivisions have cropped up in what had been greenspaces. And on the western edge, you can spy the new Community Recreation & Cultural Centre.

Harrison Hot Springs

Harrison Hot Springs has also grown slowly. In a couple decades, there have been only a handful of aerial-visible improvements, but a couple of them—the plaza at the west end of the lagoon and the boat launch at the east—are major additions on the ground. Elsewhere, a significant single-family development in the centre of town and a multi-family building near the resort are the most obvious land changes. It’s also hard to miss the marine play palace just off shore.

Aldergrove

Like a handful of other areas—Garrison and Willoughby most prominently—Aldergrove’s changes are readily evident by the sheer scope of expansion and change over the last two decades. Aldergrove has grown outwards in every direction, with residential developments all across the community’s fringes.

The circle on the eastern edge of town shows agriculture development, with a warren of trees cut down to allow for the growing of more crops.

Kent

Just outside of Agassiz sits two of the Fraser Valley’s myriad prisons. Like in Mission, the aerial imagery shows major developments here, with two major blocks added at Kent Institution, the major maximum-security prison. It sits south of Mountain Institution, which has also seen changes, albeit ones smaller in nature to its neighbour. Nearby, one can view changes at two gravel operations, as well as an additions at Agassiz Speedway.