The City of Richmond purchased the Garden City Lands for $59.17 million at the end of March 2010. Before that, Canada Lands Company held the title, and the Musqueam Indian Band had a 50% beneficial interest. The Musqueam
traded their interest in the profits from the sale to Canada Lands for the Nokia building in Burnaby. A few days after Richmond bought the property, the Musqueam sued Richmond, mainly seeking a lot more money, and that legal action is proceeding slowly.
The Garden City Lands remain in the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) as open-land park. The old signs that used to prohibit access are gone, but public entry is not being actively encouraged. The property is ecologically sensitive as the western end of the Lulu Island Bog, and Richmond is
maintaining it as such. There appear to be ways to combine ecological protection with agricultural uses and with public access, presumably with some effective educational means for promoting respect for the ecosystem and crops.
Richmond citizens have put forward many other proposals for
ALR uses, especially ones with a focus on local food security combined with trail access for City Centre residents, along with agri-tourists, eco-tourists, and everyone else. The first and most comprehensive was the
Sustainable Food Systems Park proposal that the Richmond Food Security Society and Richmond poverty response advocates presented to Richmond council on February 6, 2007, with an encouraging response from council. It seems (from the Richmond papers) that concern for local food security has grown since then, and the society evidently remains interested in the project.
Kwantlen Polytechnic University, which is located nearby, was encouraged by Richmond council when Kwantlen proposed an urban agriculture education program to them on February 5, 2008. Classroom work would be on the existing campus, and the students would put theory into practice by farming forty to fifty acres and assisting other users, with faculty-led research accompanying it all. The university and at least one councillor have shown
continued interest in locating the program on part of the Garden City Lands. It would fit well with the Sustainable Food Systems Park approach.
On the basis of
recent Agricultural Land Commission decisions on top of ALC refusals to remove the Garden City Lands from the ALR in 2006 and 2009, it seems almost certain that the Garden City Lands will remain in the ALR as open-space park. A repeatly expressed vision of citizens who have advocated for conserving the green space is that the 136.5 acres of parkland will be "Richmond's Stanley Park," a large accessible park in the city centre that expresses the identity of the community. Instead of a forest theme, there would presumably be an agricultural and/or ecological theme that is in keeping with the history and vision of the people of Richmond.
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