Next week, September 01 2023, the Village of Pemberton will host a summer pop up from 3pm – 6pm, to check out the Official Community Plan efforts and add your comments to the direction this town is headed.

During the first phase of engagement, the Village of Pemberton heard:

• Growth management is the biggest challenge facing Pemberton over the next 25 years.
• Affordable housing is the #1 priority the OCP Review should focus on.

This pop-up event is a chance to talk more about these topics. Read through ‘Let’s Talk about Growth & Development’ (extracted below) and drop by to share your thoughts.

PS If Pemberton is able to BUILD its way towards affordability, it will literally be the first place on Earth able to do that. I think we’re looking for solutions in the wrong places, because we’ve already been building at such a rapid pace, people can’t even staff their job sites and affordability is getting further and further out of reach.

The highway is already a snarl of traffic. What about if we pressure the province and say, we refuse to be part of this densification and development push, unless the province finally steps up and provides public transit. Because every living unit we add to the town, brings another vehicle, or more.

Ottawa has a vacant unit tax (read about it here: https://www.davidmoscrop.com/p/ottawas-vacant-unit-tax-is-working) to incentivize investors who are just sitting on empty property, and driving up the prices, to either rent them out, or to pay into an affordable housing fund as their penalty. It would be great to look around the world – where this issue of growth and affordability is playing out everywhere – to generate a bunch of creative responses beyond the knee-jerk BUILD MORE, DENSIFY, KEEP BUILDING. Just to, you know, have a few other options.

Anyway, if it gets you all stressed out, you’ll be at the Farmers Market, and you can enjoy some fresh food, baking, or beverages, which makes the insanity of the times we are living in all a bit more palatable.