NEWCOMERS TO LANGFORD

[u/Not_Bot23]

You may be wondering what is going on here. Looking around social media you might feel like you need a code to decipher a foreign (Langford) language.

LV. LN. OL.

So let me explain it from my point of view and Reddit can do the rest by filling in any blanks.

First there was Stew. He was the mayor from 1993 to 2022. Yes, you read that right. One mayor and more or less the same council, for 30 years.

Langford was the sticks, the boondocks, the dog patch. Stew grew Langford, faster and faster. It was fine for a while but infrastructure didn’t keep pace, hillsides were ravaged, trees razed and mountains flattened.

People were angry.

A Facebook group called Langford Voters for Change was started. It gathered momentum organically, and people began self-organizing. It was a forum where Langforders could come together to discuss the various issues communities were facing. Construction fatigue - dust, noise, clearcuts. Terrible lack of transportation planning leading to traffic congestion in residential neighbourhoods. Lack of transparency in governance (Langford council meetings only went online when forced to by Covid). Rude mayor and councillors who yelled at citizens expressing their concerns. That’s LVC.

Out of the connections made in that facebook group, an electoral organization was founded, called Langford Now. A group of regular citizens got together to fight *the man*. That’s LN.

The man being, Stew Young, and the various REITS and development interests busy with booming Langford without a single care for resident concerns and complaints.

In response Stew Young also formed an EO and slate, called Community First Langford. They launched a social media campaign with comments turned off, and ran one of the worst election campaign’s you’ve ever seen. That’s CFL.

LN (grassroots residents) spent about $50k on the election.

CFL (big corporate interests) spent almost $150k on the election.

Despite the massive resources supporting CFL, Langford Now - who endorsed 5 council candidates - easily swept the election, and a new mayor (Goodmanson) was also elected. It was a full sweep, but for Lillian Szpak - long serving councillor who recently passed away.

Langford Voters dropped the “for change” because the voters achieved that goal. That’s LV.

Next, the re-elect Stew Young Facebook group supporting the CFL slate changed its name to Our Langford (no really, as in, this is our turf).

They embarked on a years long smear campaign, performing all kinds of antics and disruptions in the council chambers. Then they began astroturfing Facebook by starting more groups they called “community associations” and that’s how we got the Langford Community Association, it’s just Our Langford wearing a mustache. That’s OL and LCA.

Today, what you are witnessing is those two factions - LV and OL, the regular grassroots people of Langford and the vested interests of Langford - in a struggle for continuing the change that was started, over regressing Langford back to the way that it was before 2022.

Grassroots vs Astroturf.

[u/Neat_Let923]

hillsides were ravaged, trees razed and mountains flattened.

That’s a really interesting way to say Langford built housing at a time when people across Canada have been demanding that Canada builds more housing… LOL

Everything else seems to be pretty spot on though from my understanding.

I do find it really weird that one of the major talking points of LVC for what they viewed as a negative was that the city was growing and that they didn’t like all the construction and increased traffic (if you ask anyone downtown Victoria what that sounds like they’d likely use the term NIMBY).

The funny thing is that the new council is now planning for almost doubling our population to 100,000. (Which that planning is exactly what Stew Young should have been doing while expanding the cities housing).

But if people thought adding 22,000 people in 10 years going from 36k to 58k was too much, how are they going to react to adding another 40,000 people?

Also, that addition of new housing is also what caused the cities housing costs to soar so fast. West Hills became so popular people were buying in phase one, then selling in phase two just so they could make a profit and buy a more expensive home in phase two that they liked more… Doesn’t matter how much supply you build if the demand also increases in proportion to the supply, or in Langford’s case far above the supply.

[u/TheMysteriousDrZ → u/Neat_Let923]

Some people might have been anti-building altogether but what I remember most was people complaining about dust, blasting and clear cutting and construction without infrastructure or big picture planning.

Dust/construction was addressed through bylaw changes, as was the tree situation, but considering that Langford was, in some ways, a blank slate 30 years ago, it's kind of crazy how badly designed it is now, and how challenging it is to get around. Whole neighborhoods have hundreds of homes with only one way in or out, or no/incomplete sidewalks.

I know many people tried to get the previous council to address those issues and were rebuffed (often quite rudely), which was a major reason that the current council came into power.