Golden Ears Business Park: The Working End of Town

Most of us spend the whole week inside a few square kilometres at the south end of this city and never once turn west on Airport Way. There is no reason to unless you work out there, you fly, or you are riding out to the dike. But roughly 189 acres of Pitt Meadows is light industrial land in the Golden Ears Business Park, and a good share of the work that pays the mortgages in South Bonson and Somerset happens behind those roll-up doors.

It does not present well from the road, which is more or less the point. Tilt-up concrete in grey and beige, loading bays, gravel yards behind chain link, drainage ditches, long stretches with no sidewalk at all. Flat, obviously. Everything here is flat. The buildings sprawl low and wide because the land allows it and because trucks need room to swing.

I like it out there, for what that is worth. It is the one part of town that is honest about being a place where things get built, fixed, stored and driven away.

How it is laid out

Airport Way is the spine. It runs west out of the populated end of the city toward Pitt Meadows Regional Airport, with the business park along it and farmland pressing in at the edges. Off the main road you are into industrial streets lined with multi-unit buildings, most of them addressed by unit number rather than by anything you can read from a moving car. Get the unit number before you leave home. You will need it.

The airport is the constant out here, and people who move to this city stop noticing aircraft overhead inside a month. Beyond the business park it is farmland and dike, which is why cyclists treat Airport Way as a route rather than a destination.

The businesses that need a yard, not a storefront

The tenant mix follows one rule. Work that involves a truck, a trailer, a compressor or a pile of material ends up in industrial zoning, because nowhere else in a city this size has the room for it. Boileau Electric & Pole Line is exactly that shape of business, electrical work at the scale of poles and services rather than the light fitting in your hallway. Petra Contracting is the same idea from the construction side, where the real workplace is somebody else's site and the home base is an office, a yard and somewhere to park the trucks overnight. Meadows Landscape Supply sells soil, mulch and aggregate by the yard, which is not a product anybody is moving out of a shop unit on Harris Road.

Vehicles follow the same logic. DBM Automotive on the repair side and DBM Auto Sales on the used vehicle side both need bays, room to work and somewhere to keep stock, none of which fits a retail plaza. Diplomat Window Tinting needs a clean indoor bay and a door you can drive a car through. None of this is glamorous and none of it is pretending to be.

The reasons a non-worker drives out

Industrial zoning quietly collects businesses that sell to the public but refuse to pay retail rent. Small breweries land in industrial bays all over this region because that is where the ceiling height, the floor drains and the tolerant landlords are, and Foamers' Folly Brewing Co. is the local name for that. Dinkydoo Fabrics is the other pattern, a business that needs racking and packing space far more than it needs a window display. The Original Lunch Doctor works the opposite direction again, feeding people at an end of town that is short on options.

Lunch is the weak point

Everyone who works out there will tell you the same thing. There is almost nowhere to eat. That is arithmetic more than bad planning: a city of nineteen thousand cannot support a lunch strip in an industrial district on the far side of town, and the daytime population out there goes home at the end of the shift. In practice it means driving back toward Harris Road or down to the Lougheed, ordering in, or bringing something from home. Budget the round trip honestly, because there is one road in and it is the same road out.

Before you drive out

• Take the unit number. Buildings run to a dozen tenants and the signage is modest.
• Assume trade hours. Trades start early and Saturdays vary by tenant. Phone first.
• Watch for reversing trucks. Drivers out here are expecting other trades, not visitors.
• On a bike it is easy. The whole city is flat and the ride out is a straight one.

The city is protective of this land and it should be. Most of the municipality is farmland inside the Agricultural Land Reserve and cannot be turned into anything else, the residential strip in the south is compact, and what is left is a fairly small number of acres where a business can own a yard and make noise in it. Golden Ears Business Park is that land. It is not pretty, and it is the reason a decent number of people here get to work five minutes from home.