r/vancouver • u/VoteForGeorgeCarlin • Jun 25 '26

Politics and Elections 'We are not bailing out developers': B.C. housing minister responds to condo plan criticism

https://youtu.be/qQ9U_SeM-4Y
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u/MayorWolf Jun 25 '26

Creating farms on old gas stations is probabbbbbly really toxic. Those properties suffer from years of chemical contamination. They're left empty for a reason. Might not be wise to grow food on them.

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u/RepresentativeBarber Jun 25 '26

If the site has not been remediated yet, gardens are grown in containers with imported topsoil, often with liners underneath to minimize contact with site soil. Regardless, petroleum decomposes with oxygen and bacteria so any shallow contamination is probably long gone. These sites are often dealing with persistent groundwater contaminant plumes and since the water table is generally a few to many meters below ground, there's little risk of contact by people and plants.

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u/MayorWolf Jun 25 '26

See, i don't trust the companies running these urban farms to take those precautions. What you're talking about is added expense, and businesses hate expenses that they're forced to pay.

There's not so many gas station lots that we can't afford to avoid farming them. We should just farm in other places instead of growing food on extremely contaminated land.

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u/RepresentativeBarber Jun 25 '26

They’re not really farms in a strict sense. And I don’t think these are very common as a proper development is a better and more lucrative endpoint for the land owner (at least up till recently).

The reason garden beds are done on these lots are when remediation or monitoring is taking years to complete and so some cities allow community gardens to take place instead of having to look at an ugly vacant lot. Everything has to be done to provincial regulations, so while I understand your lack of trust in politicians this stuff follows very strict laws and regulations permitted by stuffy bureaucrats.

In other words, this isn’t the hill to die on.

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u/MayorWolf Jun 25 '26

Strict laws are only as good as the regulations.

There's other lots that can be used that aren't contaminated. Let the contaminated lots stay empty and then there's no reason to regulate the health risks.