[HN Gopher] Kitsault, Canada's $50M 1980s ghost town ___________________________________________________________________ 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... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-29 23:00 UTC)