By Frank Liberto
Anti-gentrification work in Hamilton is important, yet there are many potential pitfalls in it. The template comes from such "world city" locales as New York, London and Toronto, where the concentration of corporate and financial command functions have seriously altered the class composition in favour of upper-middle and ruling classes.
But Hamilton belongs to the Rust Belt, a somewhat different category of social geography. The offshoring of manufacturing has resulted in a serious disinvestment in the inner city, which has lost tens of thousands of people in the last few decades through suburban flight and mass commuting. Here, "gentrification" might mean a return of working people, not their displacement. A "yuppie" in Hamilton might be a precarious white-collar worker looking for low-cost housing close to public transit.
Meanwhile, sprawl - the cancerous growth of the city onto farmland and green space - remains one of the biggest challenges in Hamilton. Sprawl is an obvious ecological disaster, but it also hurts the poor in many indirect ways. Municipal subsidization of greenfield development disperses workers over an ever wider area, while drawing potential funds from transit and social housing.
Sprawl in the Rust Belt
Cool.
Always great to see you, Mick.
Thanks, it's nice to be appreciated. :)
Hope you enjoy the article!
I can't see the sprawl as a viable long term environment for housing. The environmental issues are obvious. As fuel becomes more expensive and traffic clogs the commuter routes living in Binbrook and commuting to Toronto is going to look a lot less attractive as a long term lifestyle option. Further, given the lack of foresite in planning these communities, lots of cul-de-sacs and meadering crescents, there is little or no hope of mass transit. Living in these communities traps one into car culture. A car is a necessity to go grocery shopping, and busing is required for kids at school. The lifestyle in Hamilton proper is preferrable in the long term. Decent transit, easy access to services and improving mass transit links over the long term. Hamilton was our first choice for resettling when we retired. All cities have issues, Hamilton's are no worse than most and a good deal better than some.
This is a good piece, but there are some items that can added.
"Municipal subsidization of greenfield development disperses workers over an ever wider area, while drawing potential funds from transit and social housing."
That is true, but when you take it the next step, sprawl homes are sold within separate enclaves that fall within price ranges. There could be within a particular real estate market, for example, the $75,000-$125,000 condos, the $125,000-$250,000 single family homes, and then the McMansions. The result is that economic divisions are built into the municipal social fabric.
The preference for green field development goes to input costs. If homes are now commodities, the primary input is land. Green fields are cheaper than serviced brownfields, and both the province and the municipality will subsidize the extension of services. The decantering of the inner city to the 'burbs, leaves behind a tremendous amount of built infrastructure requiring maintenance and policiing, without the tax base to support it.
Further, the home building economy is our only remaining productive economy of any size. Home building and the auto industry our the twin drivers of the North American economy. When people buy a home or a car, they outfit, they accessorize it, they maintain it, improve, furnish it, etc ...
The auto industry, however, is doing a vanishing act (and has been for years as auto making is really parts assembly) and the home building economy, as well as auto sales, is founded on the solid footing of consumer debt.
Gentrification will be a growing problem as the 'burbs fall into disfavour and the middle-classes begin the migration back into cities to demand the services they've starved of funding for years.
The preference for green field development goes to input costs. If homes are now commodities, the primary input is land. Green fields are cheaper than serviced brownfields, and both the province and the municipality will subsidize the extension of services. The decantering of the inner city to the 'burbs, leaves behind a tremendous amount of built infrastructure requiring maintenance and policiing, without the tax base to support it.
I'm not sure what you are saying.
In commodification, land is not the prmary input. The preference for green field is that only input costs are considered. Even when the developer pays all the initial built costs of providing services, that is cheaper for them and short term cheaper for the municpal units.
I have heard that there are some moves in Ontario to increase property tax rates for sprawl to reflect the higher maintenance costs. I wonder how extensive this is / is becoming. Strikes me as at least solving the distorted costs issues for the municipal units, but provides very little disincentive for sprawl to the developers. It will take a long time before the higher taxes are taken into account enough by new home buyers to impact the developers.
Seems to me we need provinces imposing substantially higher front end development fees in sprawl areas. Imposing a level plaing field among municpal units, who have the carrot of the substantial new revenue source [with the province keeping a share to reflect the higher transportaion infrastructure costs they absorb from sprawl].
In Ontario I believe we are still living with Mike Harris's statutory cap on development charges. The municipality can only charge back a small portion of what it costs to service new areas.
Land is the primary and most expensive single input in home building. Even at a $10,000 per lot, it would represent a developer's single largest expense. It is commodified by being standardized by the developer (treed, fillled, leveled). Greenfield development is seldom cheaper for the municipality.
In Ontario, development fees, which are set by each individual municipality and thus subject to political influence, seldom, if ever, cover the cost of extending hard services. In many cases, such as roads, there is even a formula to determine how much should be paid by the developer and how much by the municipality.
Then there are all of the soft services that are never factored into the cost of a development: libraries, policing, community centres, etc ...
Plus, as the population is decantered from the core, those inner-city neighbourhoods lose their soft services, schools and libraries close, for example, leaving them even less desirable as places to live.
What we need is a complete moratorium on greenfield development. There is no shortage of places to build houses, if we must build houses, within existing, serviced areas. Because of the influence of developers in municipal elections, many city councils believe it is their mandate to ensure a land speculator never loses his/her bet.
The Ontario Municipal Board is understood to be the final arbiter, and the concensus was that it would not block development of a 960 unit housing development in a Cambridge "conservation" area.
And now the city has been informed that the piping servicing whol subdivisions in the 1950s and 60s is making like a sieve and needs replacing, immediately.
Excellent summary of the sprawl situation, FM. Your concern about the future of the "home building industry" however is misplaced if the much-vaunted idea of greening our buildings is ever taken up. More than enough work, for sure, just replacing/upgrading what we have, buildings and plumbing. :)
I remember back to the late 80's or early 90's, the City of London went to the OMB with a plan to annex a bit of land, if I recall rightly, to gain some land for industrial use. The OMB came back with a ruling that gave London a HUGE swath of land that it didn't even ask for. I think the southern boundry basically ends at Elgin county, and in the north it took in the village of Hyde Park.
Fast forward, and we get to see the inherent bias of the OMB towards developers. Developers who are generous to both municiple and provincial politicians. Provincial politicians who appoint people to boards like the OMB.
So Walmart decided it wanted to locate at Fanshawe and Hyde Park road, Walmart and Crappy Tire and the whole Big Box junta. So, the land was torn up, and so was the main street of Hyde Park for over a year, to accomodate larger infrastructure like sewers, wider roads, whatever. One can imagine what this did to existing mom and pops on the main drag of Hyde Park.
Now, of course, Walmart demanded bus service because their wages won't attract people who can afford cars to get out to what I now call Hydeparkistan.
And this costs us all, along with police having to police this far flung area, garbage pickup, the list goes on and on and on.
To me, sprawl is a good example of how costs are externalized by developers, speculators and the businesses and residents who live there. To make this appear to make sense economically, some very selective and, I willl say, creative book keeping has to be in place.
But, you bet the family compact of the Conservative/Liberal parties, developers and their appointed buerothugs keep a nice set of books for themselves.
And themselves only.
Ontario municipalities' residual discretion to write bylaws governing development charges is limited politically, and under the Development Charges Act, these bylaws can also be appealed to the OMB.
A few years ago there was talk about cleaning up the OMB OIC appointments to get rid of pro-developer bias. I wonder if that improved things at all. Doubtful; for one thing, their whole adjudicative process at that agency is based on the conviction that land use planning decisions must be governed by certain so-called "sound planning principles", which frequently are not even identified much less discussed at their hearings.
And now the city has been informed that the piping servicing whol subdivisions in the 1950s and 60s is making like a sieve and needs replacing, immediately.
That's something that's been happening like clockwork across the GTA. Hard infrastructure gets to be around 50 years old and needs repair or replacing. Development charges won't or can't pay for this so property taxes go up. This has been from the 90s a big part of Toronto's financial problems and has more recently as the infrastructure gets to that age spread to Mississauga, Vaughan, Markham and Pickering which have all implemented large property tax increases.