Neighbourhood rallies to save green space beloved by generations of kids on quiet suburban street

Petitions with more than 200 signatures aim to stop city's sale of property to build a house on lot used by children since 1991

“We don’t want to see a house there. We want to play there.”

That’s what a little girl sitting on a bike told me at a suburban cul-de-sac I was invited to by parents on Monday afternoon.

Neighbours weren’t notified but they were upset to see a for-sale sign put up recently on Cumberland Park, a small sub-neighbourhood park beloved by generations of kids for more than 30 years. 

Surrounded by Sardis homes built in the early 1990s, 44692 Cumberland Ave. is untouched by construction equipment, an oasis covered with a dozen centuries-old trees, various plants and undergrowth, and a makeshift bike trail. 

“In a time where kids are increasingly pulled indoors by screens, spaces like this matter more than ever,” neighbour and parent Jilleen Anderson told me. “It’s one of the last places nearby where they can just be kids – freely, safely, and actively.”

As I walked up to the property, a boy named Spencer called out to his friend Jackson, Jilleen’s son, as the two pedalled hard before launching from the pavement over the flat curb onto a brown ribbon of soil, hit that first jump and did a lap on the green space on a residential lot in Sardis.

Others followed as I took a video of them. One by one they flew over the bump, one kid wobbling with her foot falling off the pedal to regain her balance. They cruised around the route to the back next to the farmer’s field blanketed in white plastic crop covers. They curved back towards me with the littlest girl trailing far behind. I kept watching her. She didn’t quite have the speed needed so she slowed and fell forward and to the left, her knees grinding the dirt, her face almost hitting the ground. 

She looked up knowing she was being filmed, and smiled for a second. The parental instinct in me gasped and went to make sure she was OK. Her smiling facade quickly slipped. She began to cry. Her mother arrived as I did. She picked the girl up and carried her out to the street. I grabbed her bike, a lost shoe, a bar bumper that fell off, and a broken bit of her pink bell. 

She was, of course, fine. Dirty pink leggings covering scraped knees. Her mouth and teeth – my parental concern – unscathed. 

There were half a dozen neighbourhood parents around by now and more than a dozen kids, all on bikes save for one girl on a scooter. I told that girl she needed a bike. She said hers had a flat. She’ll be back.

A sub park that's far from sub par

This isn’t a mountain biking trail or a bike jump park or even a pump track. It’s just a residential-zoned lot in a typical Chilliwack suburb where generations of kids have scraped knees and elbows riding BMX bikes and whatever two wheels they have.

This is 44692 Cumberland Ave., a lot owned by the City of Chilliwack since they purchased it in 1991 as an access point for a park development that was in the planning stages. I don’t know the specific zoning history of this area, but back then, the Agricultural Land Reserve was just 20 years old. Sometimes a community could apply to the Agricultural Land Commission to exclude a piece of land for various reasons. Many consultants in B.C. made good money doing this work over the years. 

For whatever reason, the park never happened and the lot was added to the city’s list of sub-neighbourhood parks even though it’s about one third the minimum size a sub park should be, according to the city’s Greenspace Plan.

There are 97 sub parks in Chilliwack, if the city’s website is up to date, many of them people wouldn’t know existed unless they live in the neighbourhood. Some are more obvious, such as Barber Park off Henley Avenue downtown, but many such as Glengarry Park surrounded completely as it is by 21 homes are truly hidden, only accessible by a path at the end of Glenmore Drive. 

A city spokesperson explained to me that sub parks should be between 2,000 and 4,000 square metrees in size. This lot is just 622 square metres. 

The property is listed for sale for $679,900 by realtor Bob Plowright and described as that “one-of-a-kind exceptional lot to build your dream home.” 

When asked why the park would be sold to for development when the park is loved and well-used, the area is thriving, and the city’s own greenspace plan calls for one hectare of usable park space for every 1,000 citizens, a city spokesperson said the sale will help build more central park space elsewhere.

“While this lot is too small to serve as park space for the community, the sale of the lot can be used to acquire another potential park site in a more central and open location, or to add new features to existing parks, increasing recreation and accessibility opportunities for a wider portion of the population.”

Cumberland Park just isn’t part of the plan, which seems like a shame.

It may seem nostalgic or naive, but all of us Gen X and boomers remember the freedom of being kicked out of the house, unwired, sent to play outside whatever and wherever that meant. If it was in a tree-covered ravine, sloshing through a stream, climbing dangerous trees, that’s what it was. 

When I carried that little girl’s bike out of Cumberland Park and tried to put her bell back together, her mother soothed her and she was OK. But actually she was better than OK. She was a kid who fell down outside on a trail in the woods in a hidden suburban gem.

That’s when I realized, strangely, I was jealous. Biking in the woods with a bleeding knee is one of the greatest feelings in the world.

From the age of 10 in my friend Piers’s driveway where we constructed jumps out of plywood, to the age of 50 riding down trails beyond my skill level on Vedder Mountain, it makes you feel alive when you have a bloody shin or scraped elbow while flowing down trails in the woods on two wheels. 

“We don’t want to see a house there. We want to play there.”

That’s what another little girl said and I repeat it again, and I get it. 

That same girl also said, in the way that only young children knowingly explain things they know nothing about, that they can’t put a house there. It’s too bumpy and there’s all those trees. 

Like a naive adult, I explained that the developer will come in and flatten the bike jumps, cut down the centuries old trees and wedge a nice big single family home on the lot. 

She looked at me as if I’d told a ghost story. 

I felt bad so I recanted slightly, telling her they would keep some of the massive cedars on the lot’s boundary and put the house in between them. 

This made no sense. How would she and the other kids would ride their bikes in there if they flatten the jumps and put up a house?

Good point. Luckily for me, her mother intervened to explain that if someone builds a house on this property, the neighbourhood kids can’t play there anymore. 

Sad but true.

This QR code below gets you to the main petition to save Cumberland Park or click this link: Save Our Neighbourhood Green Space.

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Paul J. Henderson
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