Developers are hurting Nova Scotia’s coasts and putting homebuyers at serious risk.
Jen Graham, the Ecology Action Centre’s coastal coordinator, sends me a slideshow of houses under construction mere feet from the ocean, seaside roads torn up during heavy storms, causeways built for personal access to islands and private-property signs on beautiful beaches, often owned by Americans spending a couple weeks a year here (see the slideshow at thecoast.ca/bites). I find more shocking photos, of a house being built in the middle of a narrow causeway, on the Friends of Martinique Facebook page.
Not only do these developments keep out the public and risk life and limb of rich owners and unlucky drivers, they mess with the coasts, which are living systems. “Coasts are not stable systems,” Graham tells me later over chai. “They move, and that change [creates] the things we love, like trails and nice beaches.” Putting a road or house on a beach screws up that natural movement. I shudder to think what happens when the waves hit the septic systems.
In the jurisdictions where many of the developers come from, like Florida, Carolina and Massachusetts, there are laws against building in coastal zones. New Jersey works to identify land that is subject to storm damage and protects that land using real estate tax monies. “New Brunswick and PEI are better at protecting coasts that we are,” Graham says. British Columbia has mapped out its coastal zones and identified vulnerable areas. Not Nova Scotia.
Our province’s shorelines are a regulatory dead-zone of role confusion. They suffer the suction of a massive leadership void. “There are 15 different departments—some provincial, some federal, some municipal—with responsibilities involving coasts,” Graham says. “Yet there is no one really responsible, no real direction and kind of a collective government head-in-the-sands denial.”
And because we have no one department designated as the coastal department, no one is held accountable for dumbass development decisions. Developers bully municipalities—threatening to take their business and tax dollars elsewhere—into approving septic systems on cliff-side dwellings (of doom) because the province lacks standardized buffer zones.
The developers make a pretty penny off rich Americans ignorant of Maritime weather patterns, and the rest of us pony up the dough to build roads to their doors and save their asses when Tropical Storm Cabot hits. We also drop a wad on bureaucrats from 15 departments running in circles contradicting each other.
Climate change is hitting all these problems with tornado force. With its rising tides, bigger waves, increased flooding, greater erosion, more rapidly shifting coastlines and annually increasing storm damage insurance claims, climate change is making things much more complicated and urgent.
Even HRM, the richest municipality in the province, is unprepared. Our fair city scientists have done great high-tech work Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) mapping and wave simulating to determine where the harbour will grow as the icecaps melt. The problem is, hardly anybody knows about their excellent research, and the only detailed mapping that’s been done is for the harbour. Developers have been informed and encouraged to build appropriately, but it’s really up to them. “They’re not restricting development on the harbour,” Graham notes, “and there’s no encouragement of beaches or natural vegetation there.”
HRM, despite those limitations, is the hands-down provincial leader in climate change preparation. Smaller municipalities and First Nations reserves don’t have resources for this stuff. Yet the only regional attempt to analyze the coastal hazards of climate change, the $2.3 million Atlantic Climate Adaptation Solutions project (funded by the feds and the four Atlantic Provinces), chose HRM as one of six sites to explore. “Shouldn’t someone be helping Lockeport or Mabou?” Graham asks. “They have no money, no staff, no planners or engineers.”
Maybe Mabou’s time will come soon, if not in the form of funding at least in better regulations. To its credit, the province is holding a consultation on the creation of a Sustainable Coastal Development Strategy. You have until June 30 to influence a “vision for the future” of our coasts.
Graham recommends skipping the government preamble and cutting to the core of the matter with your comments. “We need consistent land-use standards across the province that protect sensitive areas and guarantee public access for hiking and recreation,” she says.
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This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2010.
I’m not going to contest the right of people to buy oceanfront property. However, I think we simply need some very clear rules: zero destruction of wetlands, mandatory shoreline setbacks for buildings (or intensive landscaping like manicured lawns), no infilling, careful review of applications for bridges and docks, no structures that interfere with sand transport, preservation of established access routes to beaches/shores, and a requirement for education of prospective lot purchasers as to public access rights. That’s not a complete list but it’s a good start as far as I am concerned.
I believe conservation- and civic-minded people wouldn’t have serious issues with any of the above. If anyone does have issues, they need to be strongly reminded that it’s not their water, and it’s not their shoreline below high water mark either.
I also believe that we need more aggressive public purchases of oceanfront land, for the benefit of all Nova Scotians. As it is, each HRM taxpayer is going to see several hundred dollars, minimum, going to fund the Hammonds Plains four pad arena…how many of us are going to use that? How many of us would rather have better access to the oceanfront? I suspect more than just me.
Has anybody read the Nova Scotia Tourism’s “guide” (For lack of a much better word, I cannot remember it) for this year? A lot of their focus areas have to do with the shores and beaches. Honestly if they’re not bought up by government or protected, in a few years time there won’t be public shores or beaches for tourists to enjoy, and that aspect of Nova Scotia will drop dramatically.
To get some good info around submitting comments to the Sustainable Coastal Development Strategy process go to http://versicolor.ca/coastal/. That page provides the actual official links (email and on-line forms).
This link does not lead to a slideshow:
thecoast.ca/bites
It is long time we realize that the coast is a living/changing place and we better move out of its way. Point Pleasant Park is being chewed up regularly.
We need to pressure the province of Nova Scotia, i.e. one department with a clear mandate, to stand up and regulate development. We need to identify what we can afford to protect and what we will need to let go. Make your presentations to the consultation committee on Sustainable Coastal Development.
Sorry but I think people should be able to build a house or development wherever they want to. If an owner of oceanfront land wants to sell it to a developer, I don’t think we should suddenly change the rules so they can’t sell their own property. You don’t own ocean frontage but you’re proposing new rules so that owners can’t sell it, just so it will sit there all pretty so you can go on a nice hike whenever the mood strikes you. That land might be the owner’s retirement fund. If someone sells oceanfront land that is subsiding and it gets flooded by the ocean in 100 years, tough luck; welcome to the real world. Why don’t you stop meddling and leave others alone. You people piss me off.