Cartwright Property Developments
ABOUT CARTWRIGHT PROPERTY DEVELOPMENTS
While the company was formed in 1992, our story goes back many decades before. The money used to start the company came from some family money from the early 1900’s when our family had a road maintenance and repair business. Two brothers and a cousin were all farmers and started the business as a means to generate income in the off-season. When they all passed, the money was divided up among over 25 siblings from the three families in the next generation. Eventually, the small bundle of money was invested in a property of land in Vancouver.
In the 1950’s, Granville Island, a small island in False Creek ceased being an island, in a massive project the City of Vancouver took on to backfill the back channel and create additional parks, commercial and industrial space. A large fire on the island affected several businesses, and the purchase of a small property was made. The records of the exact location, but in the 1980’s, family trips to the popular location often included stories about how we used to own some land on the island that had a few buildings on which were leased to some commercial and industrial companies. In the 2010’s after extensive review of family records, while no primary documents were discovered, we believe the lands were actually on
or near that part of the island that was backfilled.
OUR ROOTS IN THE LAND
We believe that the property was held until the 1970’s when it was sold as part of a government reassignment and a larger track of land was purchased down on 0 Avenue in Langley, on the Canadian and USA border. Decades later, that property was sold and the money was used fund Cartwright Property Developments.
To honour that family legacy, our company was named after the primary road on Granville Island.
OUR NAMESAKE
The street name was selected by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation sometime in the 1970’s as part of the island’s redevelopment. *John Cartwright*, a 19th-century British naval officer and influential political reformer known as the "Father of Reform." He worked tirelessly at pursuing
the ideas that there should be government by the people, legal equality, and a form of secret ballots in equal electoral districts. He was also an industrial and agricultural innovator, a person driven by efficiency. He improved on the steam transition for power, he mechanized a system for wool
harvesting (beneficially used and made public by his brother Edmund Cartwright), he performed crop trials on land in England yielding better crop outcomes and worked on enrichment systems of loam soils, he developed a mechanized drill device for the systematic sowing of seeds in rows at specific spacing depending on the type of seed.