As Kelowna burns …

While the West Coast drips in the cool rain, the Interior burns in the sun. In between lie the Cascade Mountains, separating the Fraser Valley from the Okanagan. When, in the 1950s, the highway connecting these two distant lands was sufficiently improved, the Okanagan overnight became a summer playground for those on the Coast with two weeks of vacation and a brand new car. Father could test the family Pontiac on the tight curves of high mountain passes, and a successful journey was one where neither the radiator nor the kids overheated.

The Okanagan then was two weeks of bliss, of long days, endless afternoons, warm lakes, beaches of golden sand, and a cornucopia of cherries and peaches, plums and pears. Just over the orchard fences was the prickly arid desert. It was magical.

Interior towns were modest in most respects, typically with a single Main Street and a sense of occasion. Penticton’s main drag ran from lake to lake, with a glint of blue and a sweep of golden sand at either end. Kelowna’s western gate began with a drive over the longest floating bridge in the country, and then along a gentle curve through a small and charming park, with Hot Sands Beach visible through the trees. Then a turn onto Bernard Avenue, where, no dispute, you were Downtown, the clear center of things.

We got everywhere in the Okanagan by automobile, as did most others, and so we changed the place by doing so. As the entire province motorized, Kelowna decided it could become the economic hub of the southern Interior. It could be the retirement capital of Canada. It could, and did, achieve one of the highest growth rates in North America. Now sprawling over 88 square miles, it is twice the area of the City of Vancouver with a population of less than a fifth.

Until the mid-1990s, land in the Central Okanagan was consumed two to three times faster than the population was growing, and the number of cars grew even quicker. The developers in Kelowna jumped over the municipal boundaries, cut down the fruit trees and named the shopping center Orchard Park. Highway 97 to the airport became the new Main Street of a disconnected suburbia.

To enter Kelowna and Penticton now comes as a shock. That Sixties shopping center, once on the edge of town, is now overwhelmed by the big-boxes and discount warehouses that repeat themselves for so many miles that you simply lose track. The traffic rivals the worst of Vancouver.

This is the machinery of sprawl, and it works for a reason. The land must be cheap to accommodate the vast surface parking lots, and cheap land requires more and more roads, requiring that everyone drive, requiring the need for vast parking lots. Downtown dies, people and businesses move further out, development surges out along the highway corridors and jumps over any constraint in its way, to the next greenfield site soon to be home for the next stand-alone Wal-Mart, the next self-contained golf-course community.

Could anyone be proud of this, one wonders during a numbing drive down Highway 97, or is it simply seen as inevitable, a consequence of incremental decision-making and split jurisdiction? The local politicians make the land-use decisions but are not responsible for the impacts on the highways and rural roads. Each level of government can point to the other when the system is overwhelmed by the traffic it generates.

By the early 1990s, Kelowna wanted its specialness back. The City developed an Official Community Plan that attempted to focus growth in four town centers, encouraging higher densities and mixed-use development, connected by better transit, friendlier to pedestrians, and complemented with amenities.

There are signs of success. Downtown is attracting hotels, cultural facilities, new parks, and condominiums. The transit system is one of the fastest growing on the continent. But business and jobs continue to drain out of the core. And there is still so much available vacant land within the city, not to mention in the unincorporated areas, that the incentives to sprawl remain.

Then there’s the Unholy Alliance: resident associations who align themselves with developers to both keep commercial uses and higher densities out of their neighborhoods and funnel growth into the rural lands beyond, out of sight, out of mind. No wonder their traffic problems are big-city bad, that ground-level ozone is becoming a problem in the constrained valley corridors, that the uglification of the Valley proceeds apace.

At least the problems of Kelowna now serve as the example that Penticton, though jealous of its neighbor’s economic health, does not want to replicate (even as it considers extending the sewer lines and widening the roads). Political leaders know they can’t build their way out of sprawl-induced traffic; they have neither the resources nor the environmental rationale.

People who come to the Okanagan for the indigenous landscape, the agricultural heritage, the wine, and those golden beaches don’t want to experience the same sprawl, billboards, bad traffic, and dirty air they can get almost anywhere else. The Okanagan thinks it could be a Canadian Napa, possibly something better and more diverse, but not if it sacrifices its specialness for short-term gain and disposable sprawl.

We sodden Coastal vacationers always thought the people of the Okanagan were as golden as their peaches, blessed somehow by the landscape they inherited. But now their challenge is as great as their potential: how they adapt and constrain their own lifestyles and desires in a place that was once thought to have no limits, and now so clearly does.