The province says it has a plan for land in the municipality.
At an announcement this morning, infrastructure minister Jeff Johnson unveiled a comprehensive schedule of land release in Saline Creek, Parsons Creek, and south of the airport, totalling about eighteen-hundred acres.
While the parcels of land aren’t new, Johnson says articulating to developers exactly when each parcel will be available will help make the market more predictable and stable.
But Mayor Melissa Blake, who lauded the announcement, says prices can’t be truly stabilized until a long-term solution is found, like the land bank for the municipality that the province promised last year.
Johnson says that could still take a while.
“I expect that to be finalized in the coming months, whether that’s 2 or 3 months or 6 or 12 months, I can’t speculate right now,” said Johnson. “But the important thing is we’ve got some good banks of land right now that we’re putting on the market, and telling the market when it’s coming.”
The land bank – or urban development sub-region (UDSR) – will provide enough land for 200 thousand residents.
“That would be the ultimate accomplishment in my life,” said Mayor Melissa Blake. “Given the difficulty in getting to this point – there are complications when you have multiple departments that have that crown land.”
“But the ultimate would be not only to rely on government,” she added, “but to actually transfer that ownership so we’re able to do it ourselves.”
The UDSR was originally expected to be finalized by the start of 2012, but Blake said that estimate was “a hope”, and that she’s willing to wait while the province sorts out the legal mechanism to transfer the land.
“We don’t want to see property values escalate as fast as they have in the past,” Johnson said. “Because we all know that the community is not sustainable if that happens, so this is really about trying to stabilize prices, make sure the community’s empowered to make decisions, to be the masters of their own destiny.”
Published March 21, 2012
