May 29th, 2014 — This is the stuff that dreams are made of. The pile of wood and styrofoam dumped by the side of a dirt road is an architect’s scale model showing what a proposed development of 309 homes and condominiums with 75,000 square feet of commercial space in a self contained village would look like after it was built on 830 acres of land on Salt Spring Island’s Channel Ridge. I first photographed this development when the clear cutting began almost ten years ago. The plans were ambitious but the locals who had lived on the island most of their life thought it a folly. They turned out to be right. People don’t come to Salt Spring to live in a condo on a mountain with a view of a pulp mill. They come here to live as close to the sea as they can. The development ran into money troubles early which were compounded by the 2008 crash. It’s now bankrupt and offered for sale with the incentive of being useful as a “significant non-capital tax loss”. More pictures below.