Should Vancouver fix the air quality issues in Fruit Valley before adding more housing?
Residents say poor air and soil contamination have affected their health and more development will just make things worse for one of Vancouver's lowest-income and most diverse neighborhoods
Lewis Record stands on his porch at his mobile home in Fruit Valley. Record is against adding more housing to Fruit Valley until the city does something to improve the neighborhood’s air quality. (Taylor Balkom/The Columbian)Photo Gallery
Lewis Record, 80, remembers the whisper of swaying branches and crisp scent of the air as he picked prunes in Fruit Valley in the 1950s.
Now, the buzz of traffic and odors from nearby industrial plants fill his days. Every morning, he wakes up and takes asthma medication. After plucking weeds around his mobile home — down the road from manufacturing plants, a petroleum storage and handling site, and a railway — he stops to take more medication.
“Sometimes, I wish I wouldn’t have moved here,” he said. “There’s just more smog, the more they build.”
As officials update Vancouver’s comprehensive plan to accommodate the next 20 years of growth, they’re looking for ways to squeeze more housing into city limits. Some city councilors have recently questioned the wisdom of putting more housing — and people — in Fruit Valley, an area of west Vancouver full of chemical tanks, boilers and burners where air quality is questionable.
One of Vancouver’s lowest-income neighborhoods, Fruit Valley is mostly zoned for industry with some islands of housing. Residents say they have the worst air quality in Vancouver, although the Washington State Department of Health hasn’t done widespread indoor air quality testing in Fruit Valley since a groundwater and soil contamination investigation in the early 2000s.
However, very little land in the neighborhood is zoned for commercial and mixed uses, which forces residents to go to other parts of the city to grocery shop and conduct other business of daily living.
“We don’t want to put more housing in there, but we have people who already live there that need to be served, and we have an obligation to provide services,” said Rebecca Kennedy, deputy director of community development at the city.
Councilor Ty Stober said Fruit Valley needs investment.
“Investing in it means building more,” Stober said. “What I don’t want to see is continued over-concentration of poverty in Fruit Valley. I want to see a variety of income levels.”
Some councilors disagreed.
“We’re talking about environmental injustices that have happened in this area for many years, including the fact that zoning for housing was allowed right next to heavy industrial land,” Councilor Sarah Fox said. “We can’t, as a city, continue to support more housing in places that we haven’t environmentally addressed yet.”
Pollution
Fruit Valley has experienced several instances of environmental contamination, including contaminated soil, contaminated groundwater and gas spills.
Residents say an influx of traffic, especially from delivery trucks, has made them even more concerned about pollution. More housing in Fruit Valley would mean more cars and smog, Record said.
“It’s just going to get worse and worse,” Record said. “Let’s say you put 25 homes, that could be 50 or 70 cars.”
Poor air quality can aggravate breathing issues like Record’s asthma. Record’s wife has also developed breathing issues since moving to Fruit Valley 26 years ago, she said.
Residents Dale and Denise Bjurstrom say several of their neighbors have breathing issues, but they don’t know if they’re caused by poor air quality in Fruit Valley.
“We are down low, below the hill, and with the trucks and the train and the whole bit, we get more pollutants that hang in here,” said Dale Bjurstrom, vice president of the Fruit Valley Neighborhood Association.
Dale Bjurstrom pointed out Fruit Valley has a significant number of older people, in addition to being one of Vancouver’s most diverse and low-income communities.
“I truly believe they’ve got to fix the environmental issues first,” Denise Bjurstrom said.
Eric LaBrant, president of the neighborhood association and Port of Vancouver commissioner, has mixed feelings. He knows Vancouver needs more affordable housing and that Fruit Valley is still one of the only places people can afford to buy a home.
He hopes any changes preserve the accessibility of homeownership so the area can maintain a blend of homeowners and renters.
However, more housing or not, the city needs to do something about the air quality, he said.
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“Fruit Valley residents need air that’s safe to breathe whether there are five of us or 5,000. That can only happen if we’re serious about using the tools we have to prevent air pollution,” he said in an email.
Fighting for Fruit Valley
In the past, Fruit Valley residents have fought against projects they believe would cause more pollution.
In 2013, the Port of Vancouver commission gave the green light to a proposal to build the largest oil-handling operation in the Northwest at the port. Five years later, the port voted to end the oil terminal lease after Washington’s Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council voted to turn it down, citing the potential risk of an oil spill.
Last year, the city approved a mega-warehouse in the Fruit Valley neighborhood just before its new regulations limiting such development to mostly heavy industrial areas went into effect.
The Fruit Valley and Northwest neighborhood associations announced they would appeal the project, a half-a-million-square-foot development by industrial property giant Prologis, a San Francisco-based company.
Neighbors are concerned the warehouse will make the air quality worse and increase truck traffic.
The city will undertake an environmental analysis of the growth plan update, which will help the council understand how changes, such as more housing, would affect air and water quality, among other impacts. The results will likely come in February. They will inform the council’s decision on the plan, due by December 2025, said Kennedy, the city’s deputy director of community development.
Kennedy emphasized to the city council that regardless of its decision on housing in Fruit Valley, the neighborhood needs more services, such as medical offices and markets.
“Zoning is one thing. It’s just a regulation,” Kennedy said. “If we really want to see better access and more equitable access in Fruit Valley, we’re going to have to make more concentrated public investments.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect the Washington State Department of Health hasn’t done widespread indoor air quality testing in Fruit Valley since the early 2000s.
This story was made possible by Community Funded Journalism, a project from The Columbian and the Local Media Foundation. Top donors include the Ed and Dollie Lynch Fund, Patricia, David and Jacob Nierenberg, Connie and Lee Kearney, Steve and Jan Oliva, The Cowlitz Tribal Foundation and the Mason E. Nolan Charitable Fund. The Columbian controls all content. For more information, visit columbian.com/cfj.
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