Housing affordability has become the Economic Crisis of our time.  The population growth of Canada and indeed the lower mainland has seen exponential growth and the cost of housing has outpaced the salaries to the point that housing has become unaffordable.  To this end, the Federal and Provincial governments have implemented bold initiatives to increase the supply of housing throughout Canada.  Investments in infrastructure like the planned Skytrain extension to Langley city is a prime example of this investment in our collective future.  The federal government has pledged to double new housing supply in the next ten years because it recognizes there is a severe lack of supply of land to build Housing options for today's families.

Planning experts recognize this new dual reality of lack of affordability and lack of supply of Land for the construction of affordable housing options. To this end all municipalities, cities, and communities have moved to building smaller homes with access to shared amenities.

The township of Langley has long been recognized as a place to raise a family.  We the undersigned have observed the planning process for the Brookswood (Booth, Finn, Glenridge, Fernridge) Plan. Recently, a draft plan was released and it contains two critical flaws that ignore the current housing crisis. 

The first is the lack of smaller homes and multifamily options for living quarters.  Families simply cannot afford to purchase homes on 7000 or 10000 square foot lots in the current real estate market.  All municipalities recognize this and have shifted to 4000 square foot lots and multifamily dwellings especially in areas of infrastructure investment.  The current Brookswood draft plan fails to recognize this reality and would be poor stewardship of our remaining land available for housing.

The second flaw in the draft is the allocation of 26 percent of the developable land to park space within new developments.  The intention is to have greater green space in the local area, but the collateral effect will eliminate a quarter of the developable land and this will drive the cost of land even higher.  This will obviously push the dream of home ownership out of the reach of working families and create monolithic neighborhoods. The country and indeed the world now recognizes the effect of sparse large scale housing on our global climate.  We cannot ignore this fact in planning of our local communities and absolve ourselves from the responsibility of global stewardship.

Respected councilors, City Managers and Planners.  We simply ask you listen the the voices of residents, housing advocates, land owners and developers and immediately reconsider both the dwelling sizes and the 26 percent park allocation contemplated in the Brookswood (Fernridge, Booth, Rinn, and Glenwood) area plan.