Letter to the Editor

Oh my city, my hometown, the place I always inevitably end up returning to, Cranbrook.

Why do you do the things you do? Why are you so stubborn and ignorant and lazy? If only the people you scam millions of dollars worth of grants and bursaries from knew what you actually do with the money; you’d never get funding again. Don’t get me wrong, I love this place… or I did. I love the mountains and the views and the small town charm; except we haven’t really got those things anymore. Now we’re a tourist town, all about trying to extort money out of failing hockey investments and wealthy urbanites who find pine trees novel.

There are bound to be people who will bring up the recent slew of roads being fixed; I counter that quite a few of those same roads have been fixed many times. I argue that the ancient pipes, deep underground, are far more incumbent on the surface texture than a new coat of asphalt.

There are bound to be people who will bring up the “revitalize downtown” effort; I counter that more than 50% of main street remains not only deserted but unavailable. The entire southern side of the first block of main street is devoted to warehousing unsold furniture. The northern side of main street has a grand total of seven businesses; for the entire length of the street.

Part of the problem is that the units are not available. Either spaces are zoned for strict variations of commercial use or they are being offered at unreasonable lease prices. Huge swaths of businesses have ripped out internal walls, extending their space far beyond a viable small-town retail endeavor only to either fail and shut down entirely or go build a newer, fancier building away from downtown.

Reading articles about how the city wants to spend nearly a million dollars to “revitalize” the outside of their municipal city hall makes me physically ill. That building is one of the only remaining historic buildings downtown; it is brick and it is lovely. That street is the only remaining street in the downtown area with trees lining the sidewalks, there are nice benches and new street lights. At the end of the street there is one of the only maintained parks with trees and children’s equipment in town.

Yet here is the city, insisting it needs a “parkette” with chess tables and a tree outside their personal office window; for roughly the cost of a four-bedroom family home. Meanwhile the food bank is for sale; they couldn’t keep up with the rent costs.

New buildings go up along the highway, on the outskirts of town and in the few remaining green spaces within city limits; I’m looking at you Innis Avenue. At the same time strip malls stand empty, or with one lonely business standing amidst darkened neighbours. The fifth avenue plaza, the empty strip mall on Cranbrook Street north, the strip mall across from the dog park, the William’s moving and storage building, the Tamarack Mall itself; all of them visually unappealing and bleak. They are empty and inaccessible and poorly maintained, where’s the appeal to a contractor or business owner?

What about the huge empty buildings that dot the city like a children’s follow-the-line puzzle? We’ve got the old school district building, the old Canadian Tire, the old Liquidation World, the old Andre’s audio building, the Kootenay Springs water bottling plant (which not only hasn’t operated in years, but is actually gutted inside from fire damage), dozens of unused downtown spaces and massive gravel plots along the highway and main roads.

So why are we allowing businesses to build new? Shouldn’t we be doing something about three abandoned or disused properties for every new building we permit? Why do we need so many car dealerships? Or restaurants? Why was one of the most beautiful historic buildings in town turned into a kitschy tourist restaurant with a price point far exceeding most local residents?

That brings us right into the rental and housing market.

As you might have expected, it isn’t good. Rent prices deny people the ability to live alone in many instances, requiring many roommates just to pay the overhead. Any houses below the $350,000 range get bought up and renovated by people who already own homes, before being flipped on the market for a higher value. This denies the ability for anyone who is not independently wealthy to obtain a first home.

Million-dollar tissue boxes with plastic siding creep up the mountainside while the 1970s asbestos lined apartment buildings slowly melt around the tenants they are driving out with raised rents. Whole trailer parks are uprooted and removed only to have their lots sit vacant for decades. Meanwhile new places are made for the trailers, away from the good roads, up in the industrial park overlooking the auto-wreckers; whoever named it “the view” must love irony.

At the same time the refusal to care for the older, more intricately built homes mean more poorly constructed add-on garages, less gardens, less trees, more fields of dead grass and more empty gravel pits adorned with shining pickup trucks where quaint family homes once stood. Zoning bylaws and poorly functioning street layouts add to the problem.

I actually read an article once about tenants being forcibly evicted from the place they were living, despite paying the rent and not causing any harm or disturbance, because the unit was deemed “commercial.” The unit in question was an apartment sized space above an empty business, surrounded by empty businesses, across from the police station.

It was more important to the city to enforce the “commercial” tenancy of that unit than to receive monthly income and provide a dwelling space for a local resident; let that sink in.

Children whose parents can’t afford to put them into hockey programs and buy expensive sports equipment or drive up and down the mountains to bike routes and ski hills and hiking trails banded together for empowerment and change. They raised the funds to construct themselves a bike park, in an empty field right beside the city sanctioned skateboard park.

They followed every bylaw, jumped through every hoop and danced when the city yelled “dance!” and yet the kids can’t have their bike park; because the city wouldn’t force a contractor to change locations.

The city allowed an indoor soccer field, unnecessary and ineffective to begin with, to be built right where the children have proof that hard work and determination and following the rules can get you what you want. Destroyer of children’s dreams, how do you sleep at night?

It’s not as though we didn’t have space in other places – places that made more sense; places that weren’t adjoined to the decaying monument to vanity that is Western Financial Place. The indoor field will be pay to enter, pay to join teams, pay to watch events; while soccer is traditionally played outdoors.

Of course, I’m forgetting that the City of Cranbrook seems to loathe the outdoors. No tree is safe from the theory that trees cause forest fires. I have yet to see a tree spontaneously combust, but hey I’m just one of billions of people who have never seen that. Every forested spot within city limits is under attack.

Innis Avenue will now be a housing complex; instead of trees and underbrush holding moisture into the soil we’ll have more poorly placed apartments. The community forest is a spindly, deathtrap, tinderbox waiting for a rogue lightning strike or a bored teenager with a pack of matches.

How is it that in building a “fire barrier” you managed to only remove the healthiest trees while leaving all the dead, dry, weak undergrowth full of invasive species? Speaking of undergrowth; where is it? Why don’t your forests look like forests? You clearly do not employ a biologist; maybe you could take some of the budget from the pool going to pay the garbage man to drive up and down my street four times a day collecting one bin of trash here and one bin of trash there?

The problem is not that the city does not have options, the problem is that they refuse to review their options. All of our major building projects are being carried out by Albertan companies, while the city spouts “shop local!” through sulphur stained teeth. Any time a company waves money in front of the council they jump like shiatzus for bacon; despite the myriad complications visible from a surface level.

We are a dying city, a city that would rather gorge itself on short term profit while ignoring long term costs and the impact on future generations. Our city picks fights with local businesses over respectful window signs representing our heritage, but not over warehouses that pose fire risk to whole sections of town. Our city claims pride and alliance with the local native tribes, but still holds a celebration every year to honour the colonialist who stole their land. Our city picks its teeth with its toenails while calling others uncouth. It is shameful, it is noticable and it is unacceptable.

For shame,

oh ode to vanity,

oh keeper of outdated customs,

for shame,

oh ode to killer of dreams,

oh slave to capital gain,

for shame, my city, for shame.

Sarah Lindhorst,

Cranbrook 

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