WEST PANORAMA RIDGE - It's a rural area, complete with ditches, tall trees and plenty of natural parks and trails.
"When you pull off the highway, you feel a different vibe," said Bob Campbell, with the West Panorama Ridge Ratepayers Association (WPRRA). "The real upside to this area is it has been able to largely retain its rural feel, largely retain a lot of trees, has good views and it's really a very unique residential neighbourhood."Campbell's heritage home, once the house of former Surrey mayor Joe Brown in 1932, overlooks Mud Bay and many tall timbers.The area is also home to several horse barns, Campbell said, noting his daughter used to ride in the area. And the trails that run along Mud Bay wrap around to Boundary Bay, taking cyclists or horseback riders all the way to Tsawwassen if their hearts desire."When you come in here, you see a very nice, pleasant residential neighbourhood with beautiful parks, nice trees, etcetera. That to me is the best part."The community considers its boundaries to be from Highway 10 to Colebrook Road, and from 120th Street to King George Boulevard, and Campbell proudly said the area has resisted commercial development."We've held to our zoning very tightly."In fact, he said the WPRRA was formed roughly 60 years ago solely to try to control development. "People wanted to protect the rural values of the ridge," he said.Campbell recalls hearing architect Bing Thom - the visionary behind projects suchas the City Centre Library - speak about developing cities."He said if you want to have more corporate entities and bigger companies come to your city and set up shop, one of the things you have to do is have places where their executives want to live," Campbell said. When he thinks of Surrey's such areas, Morgan Creek, Ocean Park and his own neighbourhood come to mind.Campbell loves his neighbourhood, for all these reasons, but says it isn't without its struggles.He said crime shocked for the community in 2013 when five bodies were found along Colebrook Road, earning it the nickname "Killbrook." A body was also found in the neighbourhood's Joe Brown Park last year."My 16-year-old daughter jogs by there all the time. Everyone was quite frightened," Campbell said.The carnage spurred Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts to have city crews install 10 streetlight poles, fitted with surveillance cameras, along a particularly troubled stretch of the road."People were really quite shocked at how we seemed to have made a transformation from being this quiet, rural community to where all these terrible things were happening." After the murders, his group did block watch, put out community notices and also put up a "crime reporting" section on its website, and they heard about tons of low-level crimes that people weren't often reporting."We still say crime levels are higher now than they were five years ago, but they're probably better than last year. The city does seem to be paying attention to us," he said.Campbell said his area got a lot of attention following the Colebrook Road homicides, just as Newton Town Centre did following the tragic murder of Julie Paskall. He sees the two neighbourhoods struggling with many issues, such as drug dealing and recovery homes.Transition or recovery homes are "probably the number one thing that drive people up the wall" in his community, he said.Items such as lawnmowers and chainsaws have started to go missing in the neighbourhood, and there's been vandalism, dope smoking, as well as parties, Campbell said."We have right now probably two or three that are really active. And they're huge sources of problems."West Panorama Ridge Resident Lorraine, who asked for her last name not to be used, says she lives near a recovery home in the neighbourhood.She says she regularly calls the city's bylaws department, and described the home as a "party house.""It's mostly nuisance," she said of the activity, which she says includes loud music, fights and drug deals in the streets. "They took a guy away in handcuffs the other day," she added.While she sees bylaw officers and police at the residence on a regular basis, she doesn't see the situation getting any better.Jas Rehal, Surrey's bylaw enforcement manager, said the city receives a lot of calls from the neighbourhood about unsecure vacant homes that attract squatters, or are unsightly. Rehal said the department also gets a lot of calls about nuisance activity in the neighbourhood."We've been working very hard over the last six, seven months to address those properties where the nuisances are occurring," he said.Rehal emphasized that the West Panorama Ridge community is engaged, and the bylaw department has a great working relationship with residents there.Surrey RCMP Sgt. Dale Carr echoed that statement. "Certainly, West Panorama Ridge is a great community, a well engaged community," he said. The RCMP is in tune with their issues surrounding recovery homes, Carr said, and is aware of some within the area.So what does the future hold for West Panorama Ridge? Campbell hopes it will keep its rural feel, but said the landscape is changing, due to a proliferation of very large homes."The monster houses change the look and feel of the neighbourhood, no question," Campbell said. "They tend to take the trees down. So you see tree loss, that kind of stuff, so that does change the look and feel of the area."Is the ridge changing? It absolutely is changing, but it still has a rural feel."