Surrey's new "downtown"

Today, a rant about realtor hype:

There has been a lot of hype (mostly from realtors hoping to sell units) about Surrey's new downtown core. I have yet to see this core evolve. As a former resident of Surrey, one of the characteristics that always struck me was the expanse: of parking lots, wide streets, the municipality itself and the distances you had to travel between one expanse of asphalt to the next to get anything done. I wholeheartedly blame growing up during my teen years in Surrey for instilling the "car culture" values that I had into my twenties and have worked so hard to get rid of ever since. I was 18 and thought no girl would ever date me unless I had a car, that I would never be able to find a decent job unless I could drive myself there, etc. To some extent, this was actually true- many places I worked had no decent access via transit. Up until my first car at 18 or 19, how did I cope? I walked, I cycled; I covered vast distances without a car and suffered abuse from motorists who felt I didn't belong anywhere near a road. I've never suffered as badly since, even though I am a daily cyclist in Vancouver and still see negligent acts by motorists every minute. It was just so much worse in Surrey, home of muscle car burnouts and the "you're not manly unless you have a truck" attitude. People went out of their way to mess with you. I was spat upon, cut off intentionally, had cigarettes, slurpees and other unidentifiable substances thrown at me.

Anyone I know who lives in Surrey owns a car, even non-adults. I wonder if anyone who buys the more affordable Surrey real estate considers the extra costs of operating a motor vehicle for each home occupant. If you have anything within reasonable walking distance, you are lucky.

As for the downtown core, where is it happening? Around Surrey Central station? That's a shopping mall, not a downtown. I guess you have the basics there: grocery, recreation centre, banks, convenience stores, gas stations and a few restaurants, but it is a pretty poor excuse for a downtown and is only barely made pedestrian friendly by traffic calming. There is a reasonable brew pub there, which is sorely lacking in atmosphere but is the only place around worth hanging out in, other than a smattering of ethnic restaurants. Surrounding this is a series of low-rise box stores and fast food chains, cutting right through it, a six-lane highway. It is about as much of a downtown as Highway 97/Harvey Road in Kelowna- a town that has a reasonable, organically developed downtown, even if the rest of it is a sprawling mess.

Please don't say that the future site of "downtown" is further north, in that area between 104th and 108th in the vicinity of King George Highway. That is an area so infested with junkies and crackhouses waiting to be torn down for future real estate developments that it puts the Downtown Eastside to shame. Surrey has never properly acknowledged it's drug and homelessness problems and allowed them to fester, preferring the heavy-handed law and order approach over reasonable harm reduction strategies. We now see that this method is far less effective. Learn a lesson there, Vancouver.

As far as this "downtown" is concerned, I can't see many Lululemon clad yoga hotties walking their toy dogs from their condo to the local hip independent cafe past the drug-addled wrecks shuffling along there in the middle of the day. I think Buffy is gonna drive Fluffy the hell out of there and double-lock her doors when she gets to her condo out of the secure parkade elevator. No one is going to engage the streets here without armed backup. Strike two for Downtown Surrey.

To be fair, Surrey is growing, fast. Really honkin' fast. It is filling up with high-rise condos that are selling like hotcakes, in large part to investors picking up relative bargains (by Vancouver standards) and turning around and attempting to resell them before the ground is even broken on the building site. A critical mass of people will make it easier to support small businesses and will gradually allow a wide diversity of shops and services to spring up, bringing people out on the streets more than today. The planning seems haphazard, though, residential highrises are springing up down the road from big box parking lots. Most likely, people are still going to drive everywhere as an urban village with everything within a reasonable distance can't really happen in a village with multi-acre sized parking lots. The current and planned architecture is also not conducive to this: secure gated complexes spit cars from their parking garages onto wide multi-lane roads which lead to large big box shopping centres. The surrounding residential streets have no sidewalks. Garages and driveways face the street in North American automobile suburb style, pedestrians are shunned or an afterthought.

The only place that this downtown seems to currently exist is in the minds of marketers. Population growth may cause it to grow organically over time, but without planners willing to enforce strict rules on developers, it is going to be a sprawling, faceless version of a "downtown" and not really a downtown at all.

http://www.westerninvestor.com/regional/surreyaug06.pdf
http://www.quattroliving.ca/news/Province_May08-08.pdf