Raccoons, riverfronts and pay parking

Stories about Prince George that aren't about Prince George

October 10, 2023

Happy Tuesday. I hope you had a good weekend, whether it was long, normal-sized or non-existant. The leaves hung on for a good long time but it seems they are disappearing and, no surprise, some new temperature records were set for this time of year.

Aside from the regular news roundup, today I’m sharing a few posts that aren’t about Prince George that I still think are interesting for people interested in this city and its future.

Several raccoons sit in a classroom while another raccoon teaches them how to overturn green bins

This article is behind a paywall but you can access it in the Oct. 7 edition of the Toronto Star on Pressreader using your Prince George Public Library account.

Aside from having amazing illustrations, the story chronicles how Canada’s biggest city went from not even knowing what raccoons were to having up to an estimated 20 per square kilometer in less than a century:

Sightings were spectacles that drew crowds and immediate municipal actions. Raccoons discovered in the city were swiftly captured and returned to the forest, where they belonged — or so humans assumed. Cities were for people, not wild animals.

Today, of course, raccoons are everywhere, vexing and entertaining us in equal measure. They eat from our trash, pilfer from our gardens and use our fences as highways from one backyard buffet to another. They live in attics, sheds and condo balconies. They climb cranes, hop trains, scamper across the windowed glass ceiling above Union Station, wander into downtown grocery stores, ride the subway and become trapped in garbage bins. They turn our backyards into their playgrounds and toilets. The boldest ones steal food delivery from our doorsteps and break into our houses.

And you thought bears were bad.

Why this matters to Prince George is this particular paragraph:

Raccoons are the most adaptable species on the planet. Humans, not so much. While there has been no official population study since the 1990s, it’s safe to say the city has thousands of raccoons, more now than we did then, and the population is expected to surge globally as the planet warms.

Sure enough, National Geographic reports that based on current emission models, the regions of Canada suitable for raccoons is going to spread northward — particularly areas along rivers and boreal forest that also house urban environments which, oops, just happens to include us. In fact, Edmonton is already on notice and here at home, we already saw raccoons venture into the city in 2016, and while they seem to have been one-offs, when you consider how much warmer things have been since then, it isn’t hard to imagine a future pair of hitchhikers establishing a more permanent base.

This post on the subreddit for urban planning caught my eye for obvious reasons. You’ll often hear people lamenting the lack of waterfront development in Prince George but based on this discussion, it’s a pretty common problem across the continent, for similar reasons: Historically industrial zones get abandoned, the cost/maintenance of developing them into rich civic areas prevents much from happening. The thread also points to some examples of places that have succeeded in taking it on, such as Des Moines and Omaha — again, though, at a signficant cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

An artist's depiction shows plans for the Scott Avenue Dam in downtown Des Moines.

Pay parking

Speaking of problems that are universal:

Quick news:

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