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Old Posted Mar 2, 2021, 5:04 PM
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Doing the Math in Calgary

Doing the Math in Calgary


February 23, 2021

By Nathan Hawryluk

Read More: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/...ath-in-calgary

Quote:
.....

We looked at the 5 simple steps to finding your city’s private to public investment ratio. We learned that Calgary has a private to public investment ratio of 3.6:1. (The Strong Towns recommendation is 20:1 to 40:1.) To replace its $84.7 billion of infrastructure, we found the City of Calgary should be collecting $3.41 billion each year. To get that, the City would need to almost triple its taxes.

- Some parts of Calgary are probably highly productive in terms of value per area. Others are not. There’s more to life than productivity but a city needs to be productive enough that its revenue matches its expenses. Calgarians, forgetting cities are complex systems, have focused on efficiency over resilience and removed feedback by separating and spreading out our land uses. The center of town is dense and has Calgary’s highest sources of revenue per area. This is likely the most productive part of the city in terms of value/area. Concentrating many jobs in one place can make it easy for people to change jobs without disrupting the rest of their lives. It can also continuously disrupt their lives with long commutes, and expensive housing and transportation.

- Local debates about whether new neighborhoods pay for themselves or ”aren’t your grandma’s suburbs” ignore the areas between the core and periphery where detached houses tend to be the only permitted use, weren’t designed to be productive enough to pay for their own infrastructure, and are becoming a doughnut of declining population. People may say they want low density and expensive infrastructure, but they can’t make fully informed choices because cities don’t consider long-term infrastructure costs. Continuing Charles Marohn’s lobster and hamburger analogy, it’s like eating at a restaurant where both lobster and hamburgers cost the same because the full bill doesn’t arrive until after the diners have left the table. Our cities are like an intergenerational dine-and-dash; someone’s children will get the bill.

- Like most cities, Calgary can become more productive by prioritizing our infrastructure maintenance in places with the highest value/area and then in places most likely to become more productive. We can use public investment to quickly address people’s daily struggles. And we can allow at least duplexes and neighborhood-scaled businesses in every neighborhood so many people can incrementally invest where they live. Calgary hasn’t excelled at allowing incremental growth. Until 2018, when City Council made secondary suites discretionary uses, people needed a public hearing before Council to change land uses so someone could live in their basement or backyard. These hearings took around 20% of Council’s meeting time. Between March and October 2020, 99% of applications were approved, which suggests suites could be allowed as-of-right.

- Calgarians have another chance to become more productive. The City has proposed The Guidebook for Great Communities as a tool to create local area plans, consolidate design guidelines, and act as vision for a new land use bylaw. It’s not the simplest or fastest way to create a new land use bylaw, but it has potential. If we get it right, it could allow incremental growth everywhere and give residents a chance to decide where bigger buildings should go through local area plans. It talks about a variety of housing types up to three stories tall, which I hope means allowing missing middle housing everywhere. We don’t need to blame neighborhoods that aren’t productive enough to maintain their infrastructure, but we should be careful that people who claim that allowing the next increment undermines their neighborhood’s character don’t bankrupt our city.

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On lots marked in orange, people can only build detached homes without a City Council-approved land use change. (Map courtesy City of Calgary)







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Old Posted Mar 2, 2021, 9:26 PM
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Does anyone remember what other cities Strong Towns calculated the private-public investment ratio for and what those were?
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