[HN Gopher] Kitsault, Canada's $50M 1980s ghost town
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Kitsault, Canada's $50M 1980s ghost town
Author : annapowellsmith
Score : 239 points
Date : 2022-07-29 19:32 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (justinmcelroy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (justinmcelroy.com)
| rr888 wrote:
| Looking at the map I only just noticed how small the BC coastline
| is and how Alaska takes most of it. Looks like it goes back to
| agreement between England and Russia
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Saint_Petersburg_(18...
|
| And there were never more than 700 Russians in Alaska.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_America#Sale_of_Alaska...
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I believe BC has more coastline than every U.S. state other
| than Alaska, so don't feel too bad about it.
| ZanyProgrammer wrote:
| Yes, since US states are much, much smaller than BC, that's
| not surprising.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Even Florida?
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Probably, especially if you consider the coastlines of all
| the large islands.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| BC has roughly twice as much coastline as Florida
| slavik81 wrote:
| The Alaskan panhandle was the subject of a border dispute
| between Canada and the United States. The UK adjudicated and it
| was decided in favour of the US. It was a very unpopular
| decision in Canada.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_boundary_dispute
| rr888 wrote:
| Even the Canadian claim left the coast to being part of
| Alaska, which is why I was surprised at.
| cgh wrote:
| The Alaska Panhandle (the part of Alaska that extends down the
| west coast of BC) and the coast of BC are actually roughly
| equal length (BC's coast is slightly longer, I believe). You
| are probably looking at a Mercator projection which distorts
| sizes. Try looking at a more accurate map projection.
| rr888 wrote:
| Its more that why does the panhandle exist at all, it should
| all be BC.
| twiddling wrote:
| Why should Canada exist, it should all be the US.
| bitwize wrote:
| Oh, man, the liminal-spaces YouTube videos this will generate...
| treespace8 wrote:
| I can see why it's being taken care of. A town with Tide Water
| access on Canada's west coast could be very very valuable.
| jabbany wrote:
| Also given the state of global warming... Something still
| coastal but further up north could prove to be quite desirable
| in the future climate-wise...
| cj wrote:
| (At the risk of sounding uninformed) - why?
| scythe wrote:
| Due to spherical geometry, Prince Rupert is closer to Asia
| than any other reasonable North American port (sorry,
| Skagway) south of Anchorage. Kitsault is just up the inlet,
| and much easier to reach (crossing the Coast Mountains sunk
| Prince Rupert). It also happens to be easier (lower) to cross
| the Rockies (CA-16) when you're north of Prince George, so
| Kitsault could possibly have better access to Chicago than
| does, say, Seattle (I'm not certain here).
|
| However, the col to access Kitsault from the BC central
| valley is still about half a mile high, so you would need to
| build a tunnel to get decent rail freight capacity. It would
| be a short one, easier than tunneling to Stewart/Hyder. Also,
| the inlet is only about 1800 feet wide, which could be
| difficult to navigate considering the high frequency of
| inclement weather in the area.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Canada likes to ship its oil out that way, esp to Asia.
|
| Pipelines from Alberta to BC are a political minefield but
| buying real-estate and then waiting for the politics to
| "blow-over" is apparently a thing that happens a lot.
| cgh wrote:
| If you're referring to Northern Gateway, it was planned to
| terminate in Kitimat, which is not a ghost town. However,
| tanker traffic off the BC north coast was banned, which
| effectively killed it.
|
| If you're referring to Trans Mountain, that pipeline
| upgrade/expansion terminates in Burnaby, which is a suburb
| of Vancouver.
|
| For other interesting company-owned ghost towns on the
| coast, see also Anyox and Ocean Falls. Anyox is relatively
| close to Kitsault and is worth reading about:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyox
|
| There's also Stewart, which is north of these and which has
| quite a storied mining history that's still being written
| (the "Golden Triangle" of BC).
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Yea so kitsault wants a pipeline too. As evidenced by the
| website someone posted elsewhere in this thread [1]
|
| [1] http://www.kitsaultenergy.com/index.html
| Landsubsidence wrote:
| In the next 100 years the tide water will gain several fee in
| depth. Shipping ports are the most valued geographical asset
| there is.
|
| Even a minor change in water depth would dramatically
| increase waterfront realestate area.
|
| The key here is the abandoned infrastructure origionaly left
| for the school an shoping mall.
|
| People will flee further north with time as our lives become
| more decentralized and the climate become more temperate.
| [deleted]
| Jonovono wrote:
| I just emailed them asking if they are doing anything with it.
| They responded and sent me here:
| http://www.kitsaultenergy.com/index.html
| jmspring wrote:
| I'll check the site out when on non-mobile. But what sort of
| internet connectivity?
| FirstLvR wrote:
| This is so weird and creepy, I just applied!
| bilsbie wrote:
| Let's start a hacker news town!
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Imagine if it was preserved as a historic model town, much like
| the Cultra Folk Museum, but for the 1980s instead of the 1940s.
| Some photos of that museum here:
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cultra+folk+museum+geograph&t=fpas...
|
| It won't be long before the 1980s are as remote as the 40s were,
| and we wonder what life was like in a slightly more innocent time
| before the web and 9/11.
|
| Also I am surprised that it hasn't featured in any 1980s films or
| series.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Among the commercial spaces, one of them is about as close as
| they come to the popular, liminal-space conception of The
| Backrooms: https://justinmcelroy.com/2022/07/26/visiting-
| canadas-50-mil...
| jabbany wrote:
| Interesting. Would love to visit some day, possibly during a trip
| to northern BC.
|
| One thought I had after looking at the pictures is that... it
| really doesn't look that old/historic. I live in the PNW right
| now and a lot of the houses and public infrastructure still look
| just like this! Heck, I live in a '80s house that's still in
| original condition just like in the pictures...
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I doubt you can visit unless you're a
| blogger/journalist/business guest.
| julianlam wrote:
| When we visited NY a month ago, we--on a whim--stopped by the
| deserted village at Watchung, same deal, although the buildings
| are mostly all condemned.
|
| To have essentially a town frozen in time, maintained as such, is
| such a treasure.
| adolph wrote:
| Needs to be a Lost se/prequel filmed there
| Fricken wrote:
| Another small company settlement up BC's coast, Ocean Falls.
| Notable for it's underutilized hydro station, which was bought up
| by Bitcoin miners:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Falls
| _jal wrote:
| I missed the "1980s" part at first and expected an article about
| Google's panopticon-town. What ever happened to that?
| frenchy wrote:
| I belive it got cancelled
| (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/sidewalk-labs-
| cancels...).
| OrangeMonkey wrote:
| Google, canceling a project? Surely you jest.
| fullshark wrote:
| Project was abandoned supposedly due to COVID but possibly that
| was just a convenient excuse.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/7/21250594/alphabet-sidewalk...
| jeromegv wrote:
| It's mostly local opposition, it wasn't really popular within
| the city and Google was horrible at trying to communicate
| what they really wanted to do with that place. At the end of
| the day, giving so much power to develop a part of the city
| to a private entity was weird.
| taken_username wrote:
| There is also an official website:
| http://www.kitsault.com/index.html
| nsxwolf wrote:
| The house has so many design and decor cues from the
| house/neighborhood I grew up in in Redmond, WA. I wonder if
| there's a name for that design movement of orange carpet, wood
| panelling, wallpaper, linoleum, popcorn ceilings...
| jabbany wrote:
| Yeah, this kind of split-level design was super common in the
| PNW and 1980s isn't even particularly old when it comes to
| housing (plenty of houses in the Seattle metro area that are
| from the '20s...).
|
| Like here's a random listing from 30 seconds of searching that
| has light renovations:
| https://www.redfin.com/WA/Seattle/10201-23rd-Ct-SW-98146/hom...
| and if you spend enough time looking for "affordable" options
| in suburbs, it's not hard to find ones that have not been
| renovated since they were built in the '70s and '80s.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| My realtor says that split level design is known locally as
| the "BC Box"
| olyjohn wrote:
| There's a common thing that I've noticed when going to
| Canada. As soon as you cross the border, you see tons of
| houses built in the 70s and 80s that are sided with stucco.
| They look so out of place in BC. In Washington, our climate
| is pretty much the same, but nobody here has stucco houses.
| I'm curious why so many up in Canada, but not here. They look
| like they would fit in nicely in Southern California.
| cperciva wrote:
| Not sure if this applies to houses built in the 70s and
| 80s, but I've heard that Chinese-Canadians have a strong
| preference for stucco over other forms of siding because
| it's perceived as being more durable.
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| Upper Midwest had those split levels too!
| germinalphrase wrote:
| and stucco. It's everywhere in Minneapolis.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| That was the late 70s/early 80s in North America, no?
| patentatt wrote:
| Out of curiosity I looked it up on a map [1]. It appears two of
| the closest settlements [2],[3] are also ghost towns or otherwise
| pretty much abandoned. Kind of nice to know there are habitable
| but uninhabited places left in the world.
|
| [1]
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Kitsault+%2C+BC&ia=web&iaxm...
|
| [2] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Arm,_British_Columbia
|
| [3] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyox
| [deleted]
| walrus01 wrote:
| If one looks at the area of the Discovery Islands and other
| places in BC there is a _lot_ of uninhabited area. If you go
| north on the island highway from Nanaimo BC on Vancouver Island
| the population density and town size starts getting small
| pretty quick. BC is _huge_.
| jjulius wrote:
| Hell, go take a look at the Northern Territories and almost
| all of Northern Canada. You can even Street View the entire
| drive from Dawson City in the Yukon to Tukoyatuk, basically
| as far north as you can go. It's beautiful and _eeeeeeempty_.
|
| Edit: I suppose I missed the part about a locale being
| "habitable but uninhabited". The Northern Territories aren't
| very inhabitable, but I still find the vastness absolutely
| fascinating at any rate.
| ggcdn wrote:
| If you follow the inlet back to the ocean a short ways, you
| reach Gingolx (Kincolith) [1] which has < 400 people. It would
| be a fairly unremarkable place except they randomly started
| having a big festival called crabfest, which has brought bands
| such as Trooper, Tom Cochrane, and Nazareth to this tiny
| village.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ging%CC%B1olx
| quietthrow wrote:
| More info and history etc here : [PDF]
| http://www.kitsault.com/flip_book/kitsault_book.pdf
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| FYI: This Justin McElroy is a respected Canadian journalist.
|
| He is not _closely_ related to the Justin McElroy of MBMBAM
| though they do look very similar.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Why the italics on 'closely'?
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| McElroy is a specific name that originated in two small
| geographical regions with tightly tied genetics and the two
| Justins bear a strong resemblance.
|
| Most Scotch-Irish people in Canada are related in some way
| because the initial colonizing wave was quite small. The
| podcasters are from Milwaukee which shares a border with
| Canada, is near Canada's most populous city, and was largely
| settled in that same small wave.
|
| Asserting that they're "no relation" would be quite a
| stretch.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| The podcasters are from West Virginia.
| scythe wrote:
| Everyone's related to everyone else if you go back far
| enough. Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt turned out to be
| sixth (-ish?) cousins.
| thfuran wrote:
| Okay, but if someone asks if you have any relatives in
| town, you probably don't need to mention that technically
| everyone is related. You definitely don't need to also
| mention that the geese are also distant relatives.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| Welcome to Hacker News, enjoy your stay!
| Kibae wrote:
| Are you _closely_ related to Brian Armstrong, creator of
| Coinbase, by any chance?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Thank you. I was wondering this!!
| upupandup wrote:
| BC in the 80s, 90s seemed like completely different worlds
| compared to today. Vancouver especially seemed to have peaked
| early 2000s before the housing bubble took off. Rainforest Cafe,
| Playdium, Indy 500, Vancouver Grizzlies, Canucks.
|
| It had so much going for it. What was once a fun, soulful city is
| now something completely different.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Excuse my ignorance, but do you mean something more than there
| _being_ a rainforest cafe there?
|
| Semi-tangential: you'll probably enjoy this video:
| https://youtu.be/vA-bjpKvIw8
|
| His mate made a similar video with a more positive tone, but
| this one struck me as funnier.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I think Canada as a whole peaked in the early 2000s.
| [deleted]
| dleslie wrote:
| BC was altered considerably by a series of economic crisis in
| the 90s; notably the softwood lumber dispute, the opening of
| raw log exports, the salmon fishery dispute, and the asian
| economic crisis. All told, they had the cumulative effect of
| shifting BC's economy away from lumber and fisheries and toward
| tourism and real estate.
| cgh wrote:
| The Achilles heel of Vancouver was the insane liquor licensing,
| which lead to the moniker of "No Fun City". That's what you get
| when your city is founded by a bunch of Scottish Calvinists.
|
| But otherwise, I have great memories of my early 20s seeing
| bands at the Niagara Hotel and hanging out three nights a week
| at the Ivanhoe while paying $500 a month for a decent studio in
| the West End. Commercial Drive was in full swing as a sort of
| '90s Haight-Ashbury. Now all those places are gone and the city
| feels sleek and generic, like a cut-rate Hong Kong.
| jabbany wrote:
| > sleek and generic
|
| > Hong Kong
|
| Idk, but I would not call Hong Kong sleek and generic... If
| anything it's kind of the opposite.
| cgh wrote:
| I was speaking mostly of the financial district and all the
| glass and steel. But yeah, maybe not the greatest
| comparison.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Rant: Please give-me real links to images. I love ctrl-clicking
| them and then later looking at them on the open tabs. This
| clicking an image and having a modal overlay prevents me from
| reading the text.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Right-click to open in a new tab works.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Not as simple as ctrl-click.
| curtis3389 wrote:
| Try middle click
| marcodiego wrote:
| Great! It worked! Thanks! It is a good thing that middle
| click is a three finger tap on my trackpad.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't complain about tangential annoyances--things
| like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-
| button breakage. They're too common to be interesting._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| guerrilla wrote:
| What a beautiful place...
|
| > everyone was ordered to leave town.
|
| Hmm well that seems to be the problem. A shame it wasn't allowed
| to grown on it's own and then maybe something would have come of
| it... Weird that it's private property, that is a bit creepy.
| jabbany wrote:
| Ahh yes the rich history of exploitative company towns :)
| themodelplumber wrote:
| This reminds me of NFB's _Welcome to Pine Point_, a web
| documentary about a vanished community:
|
| https://pinepoint.nfb.ca/
| designium wrote:
| At least if there's a zombie outbreak, I'd go to Kitsault for
| refuge.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Because there's a pub?
| RajT88 wrote:
| And crucially, no humans which would turn into zombies.
|
| More crucially, no competition for beer refills.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Have a pint at the Winchester and wait for all this to blow
| over.
| mkl95 wrote:
| I'm no real estate developer, but isn't $50M very cheap?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| In 1980's dollars?
| jjulius wrote:
| From the article:
|
| >Not only a ghost town, but a ghost town that was built for $50
| million in 1981...
|
| >It is a long way from any major city, and not accessible by
| road...
|
| Edit: From Wikipedia...
|
| >In 2004, the ghost town was bought by Indian-Canadian
| businessman Krishnan Suthanthiran for $5.7 million; he has
| spent $2 million maintaining the town.[2] In the end, he would
| have spent over $20 million more to fully update the town. He
| has also since closed the town to the public.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsault
| danans wrote:
| > and not accessible by road...
|
| That doesn't seem to be true:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Port+Edward,+BC,+Canada/Kits.
| ..
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| The author even mentions driving in "Which means, for a
| fee, you can drive two hours down a barely passable road.
| The caretakers will open the locked gates"
| danans wrote:
| Seems like a ferry would make sense to access it. BC
| already has a ton of those.
| jjulius wrote:
| Yeah, I missed that detail, but it still helps my point -
| that it's relative inaccessibility is why it's so cheap.
| The town itself might not cost much, but accessing it, or
| making it more easily accessible, is going to come with a
| price.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| They bought it in like the early 80s to that would be more like
| 150-200 million in today's dollars.
| Alupis wrote:
| Assuming CAD and using the Bank Of Canada's inflation
| calculator[1], $50M in 1981 equates to about $154M today.
|
| [1] https://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/related/inflation-
| calculat...
| woobar wrote:
| For comparison: one house in Bel Air at $150M
|
| https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/10721-Stradella-Ct-Los-
| An...
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(page generated 2022-07-29 23:00 UTC)