Editor, The News:
Re: Aquilinis pitch housing near polder (The News, April 13).
It is about time, the hill towns of B.C. are long overdue to get the housing off the floodplain and farmlands.
Pitt Meadows was supposed to be confined as a small urban village, but has sprawled into the floodplain.
Maple Ridge is out of control, taking farmland out of production and ignoring the hillside urban reserves set aside for this purpose in the 1978 official community plan.
Thornhill, for instance, should have gone urban decades ago.
This small bit proposed now in the Pitt Polder hills is really too little and too suburban in character and not really designed as a hill community, either, but it is a start.
Richard Balfour,
Architect and planner,
former project captain of Maple Ridge OCP