YourBoy007
Active Member
Not sure if these numbers were posted yet but this definitely shows Calgary's urban sprawl problem.
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- Thread starter YourBoy007
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1875
Senior Member
love to see the same graphic as cost
ByeByeBaby
Active Member
That is cool as hell. Here's my attempt at estimating the share of tax revenue from each of the 10 colour groups of hexagons (based on the legend and text).
In other words, I suspect about half of the city's total property tax revenue comes from land within a 30 minute walk from the middle of downtown; this area includes perhaps 15-25% of the jobs and roughly 5-7% of the population.
Urb
Active Member
As an inner city resident, I tend to gripe about how much tax money is allocated to the suburbs relative to the inner city, where collections are substantially higher. I would love to see a user pay model with toll roads installed on all major freeways.
Kōsō
Active Member
Do you have a link you could share, as I would love to zoom in on certain sections.
MichaelS
Senior Member
It looks like a lot of the newer, post MDP greenfield communities are actually doing pretty decent. Lots of green around the edge. It is the "inner ring" of roughly 70's-00's communities that are mostly red/yellow. This aligns with the recent analysis for the new community business cases in Summer '22 that showed the 5 approved communities as being revenue positive in very short order.
Silence&Motion
Senior Member
Isn't this just a function of property values? Property values are highest in the gentrified inner city and newly built houses in the suburban edge. They're lowest within the aging suburbs, which are also the most affordable areas (and therefore where the poorest Calgarians live). Presumably the "donut of decline" will continue to move outward as the newer suburbs age and the inner suburbs gentrify. So, while the new suburbs are revenue positive now, they won't be in future generations.
darwink
Senior Member
And density feeds into that. Land value vs building value.
artvandelay
Active Member
I'd say it's more correlated with density. Housing in 60-70s suburbs like Canyon Meadows, Willow Park, Glendale Thorncliffe etc. is very desirable and consequently much more expensive than in new build communities, yet these areas are still relatively unproductive in terms of property tax revenue due to generous lot sizes.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
It's not that we are always allocating funding to the wrong areas, it's also that we are allocate funding to the wrong type of thing in the tax efficient areas (e.g. the inner city) to support the areas that are less tax efficient.
Excessive set-backs, park-and-rides and future-proofed, overly-wide corridor right-of-ways protections (e.g. Crowchild at the Banff Trail LRT Station) all have the by-product of removing expensive inner city land from market (and tax generating) purposes, with the benefit largely accruing to the less expensive land further out and the commuters that live there. We then use this now unproductive land for mostly road infrastructure - and given the fundamental inefficiencies of private cars, eat up excessive budgets and land to support it. So our costs increase, while we also remove some of the tax generation potential in the most productive areas.
Invisible to the tax equation but still important to affordability and household costs - this process also triggers increased increase private spending on transportation, as the benefitting lands of this process are largely distant car-dependent burbs.
Further, to maintain or ever-increase capacity, we also push-back against repurposing that space for either market purposes (e.g. housing) or more cost and land-efficient local infrastructure like sidewalks, pathways and public spaces. Our recent discussions of Brentwood park-and-ride's future are emblematic of this - that's a huge chunk of valuable land removed from the market to benefit largely tax-efficient areas nearby.
Definitely need to get more development in some of those orange/yellow areas. you can see on the SRCmap, that those areas are very thin when it comes to recent developments or new proposals.
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Silence&Motion
Senior Member
There's a chicken and egg issue here. There's not a lot of densification in the older suburbs because they are poor areas. There's less demand to move there. In fact, most of those areas are actually losing population and becoming less dense.
Upper mount royal has a population density of 1,955.4 people/km2. Marlborough Park has a density of 3,356.4 people/km2. But look at the difference in residential property tax that is generated:
Obviously density, land value, and poverty are all correlated together. But poverty is a big part of the picture here. The neighbourhoods that generate the least amount of property taxes are also in many ways the most dependent on public services.
One of my takeaways is that land in Upper Mount Royal is way too valuable to be locked up in unproductive McMansions. Bulldoze the lot of them and build highrise, mixed-use apartment buildings!
darwink
Senior Member
Upper Mount Royal is restricted to the current density by multiparty perpetual private contracts—a restrictive covenant. They were used as a form of private zoning before modern zoning and HOAs were developed. I think the last neighbourhood to have one was Shawnee Slopes, but that one had a built in expiry. Many of the CPR neighbourhoods have them, even relatively modern ones like Glamorgan iirc.
It seems to be a few different issues. Some of inner city areas with low density have good opportunity for it, but get a lot of opposition and also have a lack the zoning for it. Two areas I can think of off are Elbow Drive and Northmount Drive. Both traverse almost completely through middle or upper middle class areas, and are on long transit routes that pass by lots of schools and retail, etc, but those roads are made up of mostly single family homes. But I see what you are saying, and it's also true. Looking at the SRC map, one can see there is little momentum on development on pretty much the whole east side of Calgary
adamyyc
Active Member
I disagree with the notion that the Upper Mount Royal needs to be bulldozed for high density.
If diversity of housing options in downtown is important, that cuts both ways. The rich need to live somewhere too.
Also, UMR is one of the few neighbourhoods in the city that actually has a good tree canopy. That canopy does not exist without these large lots and mansions on them (obvious correlation between income and tree cover).
I’d argue that in some ways, the homeowners in expensive neighborhoods downtown such as UMR are actually subsidizing the health of citizens in neighbouring communities. Trees are known to improve health, and if you go to these neighbourhoods in the spring/summer, you will see their streets/sidewalks full of people running, cycling and walking their dogs.
That’s not to say that there isn’t value to having some higher density in these neighbourhoods, but it’s not like there aren’t plenty of similarly located/serviced areas on the periphery of downtown with dilapidated homes and empty lots that should be redeveloped before we go after the UMRs of the city.
If diversity of housing options in downtown is important, that cuts both ways. The rich need to live somewhere too.
Also, UMR is one of the few neighbourhoods in the city that actually has a good tree canopy. That canopy does not exist without these large lots and mansions on them (obvious correlation between income and tree cover).
I’d argue that in some ways, the homeowners in expensive neighborhoods downtown such as UMR are actually subsidizing the health of citizens in neighbouring communities. Trees are known to improve health, and if you go to these neighbourhoods in the spring/summer, you will see their streets/sidewalks full of people running, cycling and walking their dogs.
That’s not to say that there isn’t value to having some higher density in these neighbourhoods, but it’s not like there aren’t plenty of similarly located/serviced areas on the periphery of downtown with dilapidated homes and empty lots that should be redeveloped before we go after the UMRs of the city.