Homes for Sale in Kitimat, BC

Living in Kitimat

Kitimat was planned. Not in the way that most communities grow — gradually, organically, one building and then another — but deliberately, by Clarence Stein, the American urban planner who designed Radburn, New Jersey, and who brought his neighbourhood unit principles to the northwest BC wilderness in 1951 when Alcan hired him to design a company town that would house the workforce for what was, at the time, the largest private industrial project in Canadian history. The Aluminum Company of Canada had chosen Douglas Channel — one of BC's deepest natural fjords, navigable by oceangoing freighters despite being 90 km from the open Pacific — as the port for an aluminum smelter powered by the Kemano River, diverted through a 16 km tunnel bored through the Coast Mountains to drop 800 metres and spin turbines inside a cavern within Mount Dubose. By 1954, the smelter was producing aluminum. By the same year, the town was producing residents.

What Stein designed — curvilinear streets, separated pedestrian and vehicle circulation, neighbourhood parks, a town centre set back from the industrial port — is still readable in Kitimat's layout, making it one of the most architecturally coherent planned industrial communities in Canada and a minor landmark in mid-twentieth century urban planning history. The community has grown beyond those original boundaries, and Rio Tinto Alcan's continued operation of the smelter (upgraded to modern potline technology in the Kitimat Modernization Project completed in 2015) has maintained the employment base. LNG Canada's export terminal at the waterfront — one of the largest private sector investments in Canadian history — has added a second major industrial employer and increased housing demand in a community that has been affordable relative to its employment opportunities for decades.

The Kitimat River runs from the Kitimat Range through the valley to Douglas Channel, and fly fishers who know BC rivers know that this river — running through the only planned industrial city in northwest BC — is consistently among the province's most productive wild steelhead water. The combination of cold, clear water and intact coastal rainforest watershed produces both summer and winter steelhead runs that the river's industrial municipal context has paradoxically protected by limiting development pressure. The Haisla Nation's Kitamaat Village, at the head of Douglas Channel, holds its own relationship with this waterway that predates the aluminum company by millennia and that the Haisla continue to maintain through their governance of the surrounding territory.