These folks will return each summer or each winter, or perhaps both, and will prime the economy here when they do. Some will retire here, or maybe they won’t. In fact there’s very little we know about these seasonal residents and how they might impact our communities on the long term.
What we do know is that real estate prices are impacted and a growing number of BC communities are now considering a closer examination of how we manage the growth in seasonal residents.
The municipal council in Kaslo located on the shores of Kootenay Lake, has seen real estate values skyrocket, partly because of speculation by out-of-town property owners, according to Mayor Jim Holland.
The mayor wants non-residents to pay higher property taxes than those who live in the village year round by adjusting tax rates for non-resident landowners.
"With this resort-style development, there's increased pressure and demands on the residential ratepayer that actually help support some of the more investment-style or development-style or speculative-style of real-estate market," Holland told CBC News.
The trend toward market-driven real estate has created a need for a new way of taxing, Holland said, and that might mean absentee property owners will have to pay more.
"By creating a new property tax class it could give each municipality the option to increase or lower tax rates or whatever on those non-resident properties," he said.
Vancouver mayoral candidate Gregor Robertson has suggested a similar proposal. He wants the owners of Vancouver's 18,000 vacant condo units to pay business property taxes, rather than residential property taxes.
The issue will be discussed at the next UBCM convention will be held in Penticton on September 22.
In the BC interior resort communities are not going away nor are the many developers building those seasonal resort developments. In the Okanagan there is a steady stream of them. However the marketplace is no longer local and the Okanagan no longer holds the exclusive brand on resort living in the southern interior.
The Kootenay region has stepped up to the plate and the growth of resort developments doesn’t stop there. The key driver to maintain the growth of this destination living boom remains the idea that there is a steady supply of building lots that can be placed in the marketplace.
When our provincial government launched its Resort Task Force a key mission was to move crown land into resort housing, that action certainly primed the marketplace. Now, with the forest industry in a downward cycle many of those forest companies are turning to real estate development to prime revenues.
Tolko Industries controls a large amount of crown tenure in the Okanagan, and now the company has made application to the provincial government for removal of a 62-hectare parcel of benchland along Westside Road, from its Timber Forest Licence 49.
The parcel contains water frontage on Okanagan Lake and could be worth millions of dollars in the real estate marketplace. Tolko is not the first forest company in the province to make such an application. In fact a number of large lumber companies on Vancouver Island have been successful in such applications in recent years, and Pope and Talbot is involved in the process in the Kootenays.
Such removals amount to “windfall profits for forest companies,” according to NDP forests critic Bob Simpson, as timberlands are converted to real estate for development.
Such efforts from forest companies are going largely unnoticed but can add an entirely new dimension to the development economy in BC. In fact the quest for building lots in pristine regions west of the Rockies is growing at a rampage and the best place to see this event unfold is in Montana as outlined in a Washington Post story reported last week.
Right now the Bush administration is preparing to ease the way for that nation's largest private landowner to convert hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions.
This past month a deal was struck behind closed doors between Mark Rey, the former timber lobbyist who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, and Plum Creek Timber Co., a former logging company turned real-estate investment trust that is building homes. Plum Creek owns more than 8 million acres nationwide and is the largest property owner in the US. Its holdings include 1.2 million acres in the mountains of western Montana, where local officials were stunned and outraged at the deal.
Pat O'Herren told the Washington Post, "We have 40 years of Forest Service history that has been reversed in the last three months." O’Herren is an official in Missoula County, which is threatening to sue the Forest Service for forgoing environmental assessments and other procedures that would have given the public a voice in the matter.
The deal, which Rey said he expects to formalize next month, threatens to dramatically accelerate trends already transforming the region. Plum Creek's shift from logging to real estate reflects a broader shift in the Western economy, from one long grounded in the industrial-scale extraction of natural resources to one based on accommodating the new residents who have made the region the fastest-growing in the nation.
Environmentalists, to their surprise, found that timber and mining were easier on the countryside.
"Now that Plum Creek is getting out of the timber business, we're kind of missing the loggers," said Ray Rasker, executive director of Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit that studies land management in the West. "A clear-cut will grow back, but a subdivision of trophy homes, that's going to be that way forever.
"It's kind of the ugly face of the new economy."
Rey said he, too, laments the ascension of "McMansions" over working forest, but he insisted that the law obliged him to accommodate Plum Creek's request for clarification of its rights to cross public land. Rey emphasized that during the private negotiations, Forest Service lawyers leveraged promises from Plum Creek to moderate the impact, including mandating "fire-wise" measures to reduce the danger from summer wildfires.
Under the new agreement, logging roads running into areas controlled by Plum Creek could be paved -- and would thrum with the traffic of eight to 12 vehicle trips per day to and from each home, according to O'Herren. Critics say that will further imperil grizzly bears, lynxes and other endangered species in the Crown of the Continent ecosystem, a region of rugged peaks, glacier-carved valleys, and pristine sparkling rivers and lakes that straddles the border between Montana and Canada.
Missoula County officials say their objection is not to change, which traditionally rural jurisdictions have struggled to manage, but to being blindsided by Rey's announcement of a far-reaching change negotiated in secret.
Plum Creek owns 57 percent of Missoula County's private land, a posture that under state law gives it veto power over any zoning. Over the decades that the Forest Service enforced limits on logging roads, the county came to regard federal policy as a firebreak against development.
"All these years, we've been told those roads are not for residential use," said Jean Curtiss, who chairs the county commission. "These are logging roads. They're for timber management."
If the deal goes into effect, the county stands to lose money in providing services such as snow plowing and ambulances to remote new developments. "You're looking at a real nightmare scenario in managing wildfires," Rasker said. "And you're going to have access issues: If these now become gated subdivisions, it's going to be harder for people to go hunt and fish, and that's pretty important to people in Montana."
In the BC interior similar challenges loom, and one hopes that when local governments consider a new property tax category at the next UBCM convention that they also examine the bigger issue of our ever expanding thirst for building lots to feed resort developments all seeking to meet demands of vacation residents.
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Don Elzer writes and comments about the future, current affairs, lifestyle and the natural world. He is a director of the Watershed Intelligence Network publishers of The Monster Guide, which can be found at www.themonsterguide.com
He can also be reached by email at: treks@uniserve.com
