The Hilltown Initiative is the brainchild of VPOE urban planner Rick Balfour, based largely on models of Swiss development of hillsides for residential housing.

Pronouncements about the possible “benefits” of global warming to agriculture in the Lower Mainland are very misleading. The truth is that only a very small part of our land area is farmable – most of it is hillsides where the land is rocky or otherwise not conducive to farming. The Hilltown Initiative, very simply, proposes that we be active in moving both future and current residential development to the hillsides so as to not only preserve, but expand, the amount of farmland available to us for our local food needs.

This is critical not only because Peak Oil will greatly diminish the amount of food we can afford to import to the region (by oil-fuelled trucks, trains and ships), but also because our population is likely to grow by millions of people due to in-migration from climate change, peak oil, social unrest in other areas, etc. In short, we live in one of the best places in the world – full of forests, fresh water, good weather – and it won’t be long before a lot of other people realize that. The people who can get here will get here, and we need to prepare to feed them as well as ourselves.

But the Hilltown idea, as obvious as it is, faces significant obstacles to implementation. Primary among these are developers who seek to develop the low-hanging fruit of real estate…which ends up being farmland, often put up for sale by aging or economically stressed farmers who want to get out of the business. The ALR (Agricultural Land Reserve) was BC’s attempt to save the farmland by preventing this process, but has only managed to slow it down. In any case, the ALR is reactive planning, when what we need is proactive planning to move settlement to the hills.

Society has taken this sensible step in different times and places in the past, and we can do it in BC, as part of an overal move to direct the Lower Mainland toward rail lines and mountain sides, not highways and floodplains. For more information on the Hilltown Initiative, see Rick’s presentation on the subject, or Rick can be contacted through Vandy Savage.