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Letter: All these insane Burnaby developments are giving me tower fatigue

Should Burnaby slow down the pace of development?
metrotown
A view of Metrotown in Burnaby.

Editor:

My head is swimming thinking about all of the development that is coming to Burnaby.

When is the city going to slow things down instead of rubber stamping every proposal that staff put in front of them?

This is insane and is giving me tower fatigue thinking of all the highrises that will blight our city’s horizons.

Metrotown continues to blow up. Brentwood is moving at an unsustainable pace. Now we can expect the same thing to happen at Lougheed Town Centre with that mega-proposal.

OK, I understand that those are the city centres and next to SkyTrain and so maybe I can live with that.

But now we have a proposal for the Willingdon Lands that will see 5,000 new homes built on land at the corner of Willingdon and Canada Way. That is not on the SkyTrain route.

And Burnaby is now looking at these urban village concepts in the Lochdale and Bainbridge neighbourhoods that will see thousands of new homes built through what will like be big highrises. I know the old Dairyland and Telus sites have been snapped up. You think they did that thinking those won’t be filled with highrises?

I also read about another Brentwood site to be developed. Brentwood West site is a collection of six properties (4430, 4488 Halifax Street, 1801, 1925, 1967 Willingdon Avenue and 4461 Lougheed Highway) and is located at the northwest corner of Willingdon Avenue and Lougheed Highway in the Brentwood Town Centre. 

“The proposed development would see more than 1,400 new homes between strata, market rental, moderate-income rental and affordable rental housing in a variety of sizes,” said a story in the NOW.

This just feels like too much, too fast. So many of these homes will be for the ultra-rich with a few units of below-market housing tossed in. It’s not worth all of the headaches.

When it comes to voting in October, I’ll be looking for candidates who won’t be selling out to all of the developers.

R. Simpson, Burnaby