For decades, North Delta has slumbered quietly alongside the bustling city of Surrey, its 52,000-plus residents in their mostly single-family homes shielded behind a ribbon of strip malls along Scott Road.
Now Delta Mayor Lois Jackson wants to wake that community up.
As the corporation gets set to embark on its North Delta Area Plan next year, Jackson said she has a vision.
She’d like to see more investment along Scott Road to spruce up the shops and services. In the northeast residential sector, she wants a better mix of housing, particularly townhouses, to reinvigorate the suburban enclave of mostly single-family two-story “vintage-style” homes built in the post-tunnel era of the 1960s and ‘70s.
“There are lots of areas that are getting tired,” Jackson said. “We’re going to go about trying to rejuvenate some of those older areas and look at dealing with people who want to invest in North Delta, whether it’s a shopping centre or mom-and-pop shops.”
But first she has to get the buy-in from the community. The corporation plans to set up a new committee early this year to review the North Delta Area plan, and then start talking with property owners.
There has been little new development on Scott Road, which consists of some older-style strip malls and some stand-alone shops that look desperate for a pick-me-up, since the last North Delta Area Plan in 1995.
Delta has already conducted a detailed economic study of Scott Road to identify why no development has occurred, what would be appropriate, and incentives to encourage and attract shops to the area.
The study, which also looked at having mixed residential and commercial development along the strip, found as the market matures it will lead to increasing opportunities for higher density apartment projects and additional commercial development.
“We are going to be studying that whole corridor,” said Jackson, who has lived in North Delta for 40 years.
Unlike Surrey, she said, North Delta sits on a narrow strip of land with no room to grow.
But she noted there are opportunities, especially in transforming the community into an area of small, unique shops, similar in some respect to what’s been done on Vancouver’s Main Street.
Jackson, who recently returned from a trip to Florence, Italy, said she also got ideas from the Italian city, with its high-end shops and small restaurants that could be applied here. She noted areas like the Kennedy shopping centre, at 88th Avenue and Scott, could draw more people if it were more inviting.
“It does present a lot of challenges but looking at other areas with tiny, little shops can attract not only shoppers but a variety of owners,” she said, but noted: “It has to be a concentrated effort along there.”
Similar efforts will be made in the residential sector, she added, especially in the northeast where there are a few redeveloped homes with sidewalks next to old houses with ditches or gravel along the roadside. “It’s kind of all over the map,” she said. “We’d like to encourage people to paint and fix them up.
“It’s going to be really interesting to see what the community has to say and what changes they’d like to see."
ksinoski@vancouversun.com
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