The Ponds neighbourhood in Kelowna, B.C.’s Upper Mission been experiencing a building boom for several years now and it’s not over yet.
“That neighbourhood has grown quite quickly,” said Ryan Smith, planning director for the City of Kelowna. “It was a master planned community, the Ponds neighbourhod, and they’ve been following that plan pretty closely.”
Part of that plan included a shopping centre, which is now coming to life with two major tenants now operational including a recently-opened Save-On-Foods store.
“It’s great, it’s right across from where I live, so it’s wonderful,” said area resident Linda Dunis.
As the number of homes increases, so too have amenities and infrastructure in the area.
That includes South Perimeter Way. The newly-constructed road opened last year and connects the Ponds to the Crawford neighbourhood, providing an alternate road into town.
A new middle school also opened in the Ponds in 2019.
Canyon Falls Middle School currently accommodates about 750 students.
The massive buildout has been in the works for years.
City councillor Mohini Singh said council is trying hard to strike a balance between much-needed home construction and too much development too fast.
“It’s certainly a difficult situation for us. I mean development will happen, it is occurring. People are coming,” Singh said. “I mean our population has grown to 160,000 at last count.”
Many more tenants will be added at the Mission Village shopping centre over the coming months. They include a dental clinic, liquor store, a coffee shop and more retailers.
The city said the additional amenities will benefit the community as a whole.
“There’s kind of an environmental angle on this because that whole Upper Mission and some of the Lower Mission, they were all driving into South Pandosy to get to the grocery store before and so that was clogging up the roads, more traffic, more time on the road.”
As the Ponds gets closer to its buildout limit, above it sits what’s called Thompson Flats.
It is land that was once eyed for the construction of more homes, which the city put the brakes on.
“We looked at, you know, the impact of adding, you know, potentially 800 more units in that area.” Smith said. “That really starts to cause problems on Lakeshore Road and so we’d recommended to staff after many years of review that that didn’t go ahead.”
But with no sign of Kelowna’s growth being curtailed anytime soon, it may only be a matter of time before council has to revisit Thompson Flats and the addition of hundreds of more homes in the Upper Mission.
“Things like that can change over time,” Smith said. If, you know council wants us to review it, new developers make new applications, we always have to consider those but there are some challenges with you know, adding more than the plan would have allowed.”