If things go to plan, that future will start in 2024.

B.C.’s Transportation Investment Corp. is finalizing bids to start construction on a $4 billion, 16-kilometre, aboveground extension of the Expo Line along Fraser Highway, past parks, strip malls, car dealerships, trailer parks and Agricultural Land Reserve lands to a new terminus at 203rd Street in the City of Langley.

The project will be heavily scrutinized. It comes at a time when B.C.’s housing crisis is being felt acutely across Metro Vancouver and planners are scrambling to find ways to accommodate 500,000 additional residents south of the Fraser River by 2050.

The stakes are high. This will be the first major expansion of transit south of the Fraser in 30 years. A failure to concentrate not just population growth but new also jobs along the Surrey-Langley SkyTrain corridor will hinder progress toward building affordable housing, constraining suburban sprawl and taking cars off the road.

“When you get a major rapid transit line coming in like that, it certainly does adjust how we expect the population (to grow) around the region,” said Don Luymes, general manager for planning and development for the City of Surrey.

This SkyTrain extension replaces a light-rail rapid transit proposal that would have linked Surrey’s city centre with Newton to the south and Guildford to the east with at-grade trams. The pivot, Luymes said, has “caused an adjustment in our thinking about how density will unfold across the city.”

Luymes said it won’t mean delaying growth in other areas to focus on Fraser Highway, but the higher-capacity SkyTrain creates “a higher-density scenario than we would have anticipated 10 years ago.”

There is pressure on the eight new SkyTrain stations to not just accommodate high-density housing development but also housing that remains affordable, particularly for new immigrants and refugees who have been finding homes and establishing communities in the region.

Making sure “transit-oriented development doesn’t become transit-oriented displacement” is the catchphrase that urban-planning expert Andy Yan uses to describe the challenge ahead for the province, Surrey, the City of Langley and the Township of Langley as property values have skyrocketed.

Since 2017, home prices across Surrey soared 60 per cent or more, with detached-home values approaching $1.6 million and townhomes $865,000, according to an analysis by Landcor Data Corp.

Landcor’s analysis generally didn’t identify outsized increases in land values around future stations, except for the proposed 152nd Street location. However, that could be due to the fact there had been few sales of commercial properties and signs of speculation could easily be lost in the overall noise of the market.

“(Displacement) is a fair concern, and I think that this is where the development element of TransLink is supposed to help mitigate,” said Yan, an adjunct professor and director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program.

In 2022, the provincial government empowered the B.C. Transportation Financing Authority to acquire land for the provision of affordable housing and public amenities.

Before that, the province could only buy land directly related to the infrastructure, such as station locations or maintenance facilities, according to a statement from the Ministry of Transportation.

The province “currently owns parcels of land that could be used for transit-oriented development,” according to the statement, though it didn’t say how much.

“We want to be strategic about our land acquisition, so we don’t want to advertise it necessarily too loudly,” Transportation Minister Rob Fleming said Dec. 1 at the announcement naming the extension’s new stations.

The project will be able to tap $394 million the province set aside over the next three years for the purpose of buying land and “we want to get a good price, because (acquiring) lands is critical to deliver thousands of affordable housing units,” Fleming said.

Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke welcomes the province’s participation in transit-oriented development, but her rapidly growing city is looking for more support from the province on a lot of fronts.

“The province better get ready to put some investment in the city of Surrey,” Locke said. “They are far behind when it comes to infrastructure, especially our school infrastructure and health care.”

Before construction starts, however, the development market in Surrey, the City of Langley and Langley Township has hit a standoff between buyers and sellers, particularly over the last 18 months, according to realtor Justin Mitchell of Frontline Real Estate Services.

“It’s been a staring contest between the vendors of land and the developers,” Mitchell said.

Developers don’t want to buy properties until zoning along the route is finalized and they know exactly how many units they can build at stations, Mitchell said. With higher interest rates on financing, the cost to hold properties has become prohibitive.

Property owners along the route mostly hold revenue-generating commercial development in an area of low vacancy.

“Unless there’s a compelling reason for someone to sell their land, they won’t,” Mitchell said.

Yan said the province and city have compelling reasons to acquire land, though: to ensure that community amenities, such as parks, libraries and schools — which are already beyond capacity in Surrey — keep up with development.

“You’ve got to remember, households south of the Fraser are larger. Larger, with children.”

The Surrey School board estimates that in Fleetwood, the string of neighbourhoods along Fraser Highway from 152nd Street to 166th Street where a revised land-use plan suggests development will bring an additional 8,000 to 12,000 students, an additional high school and six to eight new elementary schools will be needed.

“Certainly we’re working closely with the school district to figure out this challenge,” Luymes said. Doing so will mean considering more urban forms for schools than typical suburban schools spread over several acres of buildings and school fields.

Fleetwood is emblematic of the scale of change SkyTrain is expected to bring.

The community’s stretch of Fraser Highway has been in the shadow of development pressures since the Trans Canada Highway was built, said Dean Barbour, executive director of the Fleetwood Business Improvement Association.

Now, however, it is in the spotlight with expectations for highrise and high-density development, not the mid-rise and less-dense construction residents were expecting with light-rail rapid transit.

“This has to work and it’s got to get done right,” Barbour said of the multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project.

“Or else the south of the Fraser is not going to see a transit project here for a lifetime if this goes sideways.”

How SkyTrain could turn low-rise Fleetwood into a major town centre of skyscrapers

In Fleetwood, a development proposal — three towers ranging from 14 to 40 storeys that would rise above what are now used-car lots — offers residents the first inkling of how the arrival of SkyTrain might change their community.

“I would say that the Fleetwood Community Association was a little surprised by that desire on behalf of the city as well (as the developer) to zone in that direction of extremely high peaks,” said Brian Woudstra, a director with the community association, about the proposal along Fraser Highway just east of 160th Street.

There was a time when the community association envisioned that Fleetwood, one of Surrey’s slower-growing communities, would eventually become a bit of a destination — more like “a bit of a small town” — once street-level light-rail rapid transit arrived, Woudstra said.

However, the switch from light rail to higher-capacity SkyTrain means that the new Surrey-Langley SkyTrain corridor will have to attract significantly more of the expected population and job growth to achieve the regional goals of building more affordable housing, reducing suburban sprawl, and getting cars off the road.

It’s not that Fleetwood remains undeveloped, but it has been filling in with small-lot subdivisions and townhome complexes around the strip malls, car dealerships and auto shops along Fraser Highway.

However, the 2018 decision to scrap LRT in favour of SkyTrain along Fraser Highway prompted a major rewrite of Fleetwood’s community plan. It now contemplates Fleetwood becoming a community of more than 147,000 residents over the next 30 years, from the current 47,000.

Growth would be concentrated in the areas around three future SkyTrain stations — at 152nd Street (152 Street Station), 160th Street (Fleetwood Station), and 166th Street (Bakerview-166 Street Station) — with towers of 30 stories, and higher in the case of a proposal from longtime Lower Mainland developer Bucci Developments.

The community association did take part in crafting Surrey’s Stage 1 land-use plan, the one that would allow for those taller towers.

Members of Fleetwood’s Business Improvement Association have already felt the headwinds of change, according to Barbour.

Businesses renewing leases face substantial rent increases with soaring land values, and more of those leases are coming with demolition clauses — unheard of when Barbour started his job several years ago.

“Everyone’s getting them now, (some) as short as 30 days,” Barbour said. That is forcing more businesses to contemplate alternate plans, especially those that know they will be displaced by the new SkyTrain stations or will have to make way for the towers of its elevated guideway.

Chiropractor and massage therapist Clifford Thai, who has built a thriving practice in a single-storey storefront on the northwest corner of Fraser Highway and 160th Street over the last 11 years, is bracing for his own upcoming lease renewal and is considering alternatives.

“As a business owner, we’re apprehensive about the disruption to local businesses because of the construction,” Thai said.

His building, for example, is across the street from the future Fleetwood Station, so “more than likely at some point, it’s going to be levelled” and replaced by a highrise.

“We’ll have to find a place to go, and where will we go? Will we be able to come back, will we be priced out of the market? That’s a concern for the future.”

People driving along Cambie today would never notice a difference, but Barbour contends the village “lost a lot of its soul.”

“So that’s one of the things we’re working really hard (to avoid in Fleetwood).”