|
|
|
www.google.ca
Politics is now considered "magic"? Here I was thinking elected representatives have the power to make changes to policy and laws.
The greenbelt certainly has a distortionary negative impact on the the GTA housing market that reduces supply by artificially limiting the highest and best use of the lands impacted, thereby driving up costs. It also fuels further sprawl in outlying communities generating additional commuting that would not occur otherwise - negating any positive environmental impact. It's a great example of a well-meaning policy that completely misses the mark due to a widespread lack of economic education in our society.
Have you tried riding transit in the furthest suburbs? It sucks, and even though in theory our neighborhoods layouts are getting better at supporting transit, in practice our transit gets worse the further we sprawl. We need to change the way we design our neighborhoods so that we can serve them entirely with fast, frequent, ridership-focused routes and not crappy coverage routes.
While videos like this are fun to watch, be careful of painting all suburbs with the same brush. All of the new communities proposed in Calgary are designed in a way to conform with our MDP policies, and the more recent area structure plans in which they are located. Administration's review of the proposed business cases give a good financial analysis of their long term costs to The City. The 5 recommended yes do not require any new capital expenditures, and actually show them becoming revenue positive for The City in pretty short order. See this document:
One thing to note about any suburban community in Calgary built in the last 4 years or so. Almost all lots are zoned to a minimum of R-G (similar to RC-G in the inner city). This means that the developer, and any future owners, can build up to 4 units (depending on lot size) plus secondary suites, without a land use change. So we are not really building R-1 neighbourhoods any more.
Densify Calgay's current urban footprint to about 3000 people/sq.km and I'll fully get behind more greenfield development. We under utilize so much of our current land that all these Greenfield developments just don't make sense. Us Calgarians have fooled ourselves into believing everyone needs to own a double garage detached home with a full sized back yard. But then we also complain about our city being so void of street life and taxes continuously rising. Plus with interest rates showing no sign of peaking, we'll eventually face a similar situation like we did post-2014 and 2008, where a glut of dirt cheap new homes in newer communities will have a negative impact on demand for inner-city homes. Many inner city communities will once again decline and then we'll all be back here complaining about the hollowing of our city and the tax burden we'll likely face. This pattern has been proven decade after decade now. Does a short housing boom, after so many years of talk about densification, make our city hall this short sighted?
This is precisely my problem as well. I can screenshot so many streets off of Google maps in older communities where redevelopment is restricted and many single lots can accommodate 2-3 units of attached homes. I don't even want to get started with how much space we waste on dead grass that is supposedly meant to serve as some sort of divider between roads and homes, or beautification of a road, or some potential 2070 lane expansion. We can easily stick up thousands of homes along such strips of grass and even wide off-roads in many of our 1970-90's era designed communities.
