Christopher Leo

April 7, 2010

DOES WINNIPEG HAVE TO KISS RAPID TRANSIT GOOD-BYE? A TWISTED TALE

The seemingly endless rapid transit debates in Winnipeg have taken a strange turn. Mayor Sam Katz, who began as a firm rapid transit opponent, relented in 2008 when he and former premier Gary Doer announced the Southwest Rapid Transit Corridor, connecting downtown to the University of Manitoba. As recently as 2009, a second leg of the rapid transit system, eastward to Transcona, was on the city's wish list of infrastructure improvements.

Many Winnipeggers have probably concluded that, after more than 30 years of dithering, a rapid transit system is finally a done deal. That conception may have been reinforced by Mayor Katz's more recent declarations that he would prefer a much more expensive rail system to the bus rapid transit line now under construction.

Before you stand and cheer,

remember that the city has only committed itself to the first half of the first rapid transit line, and take a look at the rest of Katz's statement. He wants to spend the money earmarked for construction of the second half of the first rapid transit line on roads instead.

Say what? He wants a much more expensive system, but he also intends to divert rapid transit money to roads? No problem, the Mayor says. We can have both rapid transit and roads. He offers no suggestions as to how that might be accomplished, beyond the suggestion that the federal government might be persuaded to pay for it. The federal government, however, wants Winnipeg to finish the southwest line, not spend the money on roads.

If the money is diverted to roads, we will be left with an amputated half-leg of a rapid transit line, in effect a line to nowhere. A complete rapid transit line can draw new passengers to transit and provide lucrative new opportunities for development near the transit stations. New development increases the city's revenues and can turn transit into a paying proposition. A half rapid transit line has little potential to draw either passengers or development.  

Money spent on half a rapid transit line is money wasted. Dreams of future rail lines are no substitute for an actual rapid transit line now, but, for more than 30 years, our experience has been that whenever it seems within reach, it slips just beyond our grasp.

Posted by leo-c at 2:35 PM

July 9, 2009

RAPID TRANSIT: COST OR OPPORTUNITY? IT’S UP TO US

With Jonah Levine

It’s taken Winnipeg a generation to get around to building the first leg of a rapid transit system. You might think that settles the matter, and that now we are down to inconsequential details. On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that many important decisions remain, decisions that could make the difference between a successful rapid transit system and a white elephant.

As members of the Winnipeg Rapid Transit Coalition, Jonah and I have been involved in discussions with transit officials and city politicians about the central issue of the system’s accessibility. The discussions have been cordial, but so far we have been unable to reach agreement on the question of whether the first leg of the southwest rapid transit corridor will be built in such a way as to enable cyclists and pedestrians to move safely back and forth between the South Osborne neighbourhood and downtown.

The rapid transit line will run parallel to a rail line, and, in the absence of a safe route over the rail line, there will be a gap in the first phase of the active transportation corridor which is to run parallel to the rapid transit line - a gap that will pose formidable obstacles, not only to pedestrians and cyclists, but to anyone trying to reach the rapid transit line from the other side of the rail line. The gap is illustrated and explained in detail in posters available by clicking on:

The Gap, part 1.

The Gap, part 2.

The response of city officials to our representations has been that the city cannot afford an overpass, which will cost $14 million, according to one estimate. The WRTC argues, and I agree, that $14 million, though it is indeed a lot of money, is not a great deal in comparison with the cost of a rapid transit system that falls short of its potential.

At the heart of our disagreement is a question that's both simple and fraught with significance: Is rapid transit just a cost or is it also an opportunity? Unquestionably it is a cost. The transit line, and the associated active transportation corridor offer:

•Improved mobility for many Winnipeggers who cannot afford cars, or prefer not to use them unnecessarily

•Reduced pollution and greenhouse gas generation

•A beachhead in the battle against sprawl, and against Winnipeggers’ currently all-but-total dependence on cars for much of their transportation

These are public benefits that cost money, but that make Winnipeg, in many ways, a better city. In all of this, there is no serious disagreement between the WRTC and the city. Our disagreement with the overall direction of city policy is in the degree to which we see rapid transit, not only as the price of civility and environmental sanity, but also as a major development opportunity. Our argument is that a properly constructed rapid transit system yields development opportunities that can generate enough revenue to dwarf the costs of the access on which that revenue will depend.

To a degree, city leaders understand this, but so far they fail to grasp its full significance. Their comprehension of the concept of a rapid transit system as a development opportunity is evident in the fact that the first leg of the system will be financed by a tif, short for tax increment financing - financing out of future revenues. The transit line will be paid for out of the revenue that will be generated by the Fort Rouge Yards neighbourhood, a new neighbourhood on currently empty land that will be served by the rapid transit system.

In other words, the transit line produces development opportunities, and the tax revenues that those opportunities generate will pay off the money borrowed to build the line. What the city seems not to have grasped fully is that the primarily residential South Osborne neighbourhood is only the tip of the potential development iceberg.

If the city provided for access across the rail line, a world of additional development opportunities would open up along the adjacent east side of Pembina Highway. Currently, that stretch of land is home to a strip of relatively low-density commercial development, a lot of surface parking and, apparently, a significant proportion of empty land. The character of this area is suburban rather than urban, and as Winnipeg develops, it becomes increasingly inappropriate to a location so near the city centre, and the quintessentially urban neighbourhoods of Osborne Village, Corydon Village and the South Osborne neighbourhood.

With ready access to a rapid transit line, well connected to the centre of the city and the University of Winnipeg, and later to the University of Manitoba as well, that land could be redeveloped into a much higher density commercial development, or some mix of commercial and residential development. The revenues that could be generated by such development would dwarf the cost of overpasses. As a bonus, the additional riders transit would get would improve the viability of the transit system as a whole.

My central point is really very simple: It’s crazy to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a rapid transit line and then to slash its potential benefits in order to save a few millions.

••••••••••••••

This entry is an expanded version of a recently-published newspaper article:

Christopher Leo and Jonah Levine, Let's Not Skimp on Rapid Transit. Winnipeg Free Press, 5 July 2009. Accessible at http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/westview/lets-not-skimp-on-rapid-transit-49971382.html, down-loaded 5 July 2009.

Scholarly research on transit-oriented development:

A veritable gold mine of information is available at the web site of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute.

See also:

Hank Dittmar and Gloria Ohland, The New Transit Town: Best Practices in Transit-Oriented Development. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003.

Kenneth J. Dueker. A Critique of the Urban Transportation Planning Process: The Performance of Portland's 2000 Regional Transportation Plan. Transportation Quarterly 56 (2), pp. 15-21.

John Renne and Peter Newman (2002). Facilitating the Financing and Development of 'Smart Growth' Transportation Quarterly, 56 (2), 23-32

Posted by leo-c at 11:51 AM

December 13, 2008

IKEA: DOING WINNIPEG A FAVOUR OR LOOKING FOR A SWEETHEART DEAL?

The perennial "Is IKEA coming to Winnipeg?" story recently took a new twist. According to the Winnipeg Free Press, an IKEA spokesperson characterized Winnipeg as "the market that we are taking the most serious look at right now for expansion." She said IKEA has identified a location, but refused to say what it was and fed the air of mystery that has surrounded this story from the beginning by adding: "It is very premature for us to say anything at this point."

Still, it was enough to leave Winnipeg's legion of IKEA fans bubbling with enthusiasm. A typical comment on Skyscraper.com: "The fact that this city is even on the radar shows that we are not some deadwater city with no potential, as these kinds of stores don't set up in places like Sudbury."

IKEA's strip-tease approach to announcing its intentions one tantalizing detail at a time has all the earmarks of development strategists who are savvy in the ways of exploiting the collective inferiority complex of a slow-growth city. Many Winnipeggers feel bad about their home because they consider it to be, not the excellent place to live that it is, not a great place for dining out and enjoying every variety of the arts, which it is as well, but a backwater, not worthy because it is not as big as Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto.

Inferiority complexes offer excellent opportunities for head games, and nobody plays them better than developers. If IKEA does come to Winnipeg, the first step in preparing for the move will be negotiation with the city about the terms and conditions for locating here. IKEA, we may be sure, will be seeking concessions: possibly cheap land, tax concessions, a good deal on the cost of infrastructure, or maybe favourable terms regarding design and location of the store.

Every concession the city grants IKEA extracts costs us, financially or in other ways. By letting representatives of the company, and our political leaders, see how avidly we desire one of their stores, and how deeply that desire is tied to our sense of self-worth, we put pressure on politicians to make concessions. Let's hope that Winnipeg doesn't join the ranks of those who, notoriously, are born at the rate of one a minute.

29 December 2008

POSTSCRIPT

I returned from a business trip to Tokyo to find that IKEA is already a done deal. From news reports, it does appear that some substantial concessions may have been made in the cost of infrastructure needed for the new development. News reports are unclear regarding other possible concessions.

Posted by leo-c at 5:56 PM

November 13, 2008

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN UTICA TURNED WATER SERVICES OVER TO A REGIONAL AGENCY

Here's an excerpt from an article that ought to be required reading for anyone who is involved or interested in the proposal to turn Winnipeg's water and sewer services over to an independent regional water utility. It raises questions that require careful consideration. The complete article is available at http://strikeslip.blogspot.com/2008/11/wrong-regionalization-oneida-county.html

Thanks to Tom Christoffel for pointing this out to me.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Wrong Regionalization: The Oneida County Sewer District
[This article was originally published in the October 2008 "Utica Phoenix":]

Over 40 years ago Oneida County made the first "regionalization" effort in Greater Utica by forming the Oneida County Sewer District to serve 12 area municipalities. The goal was noble: build a system of sanitary sewer interceptors, pumping stations and a treatment plant to clean up water pollution in the Mohawk River, and make it affordable by spreading the cost over all system users by charges attached to water bills. The goal was accomplished, but flaws in the scheme have produced harmful results.

Dilution of representation: One flaw is that sewer district residents ceded control of the system to many disinterested parties, specifically, the county legislators from places untouched by the sewer district. This meant that decisions would not necessarily be made from the perspective of the customers receiving the service and paying the bills, but rather by many people who would not be held accountable for their actions - people who could use their controlling position to advance other agendas.

Uncoordinated decision-making: Another flaw is that decisions over sewers are made by people with no responsibility for other municipal services, making it unlikely that decision makers will be aware of how their decisions could adversely affect the supply of other services.

Diluted representation and uncoordinated-decision making have contributed to urban sprawl, the county's violation of water pollution laws, and the people of Utica subsidizing suburban growth.

Utica is geographically small, with most of its land previously developed. In an older age when people gravitated to cities for convenience, as structures aged and fell into disuse, they were replaced with something bigger and better. Utica was no different. With the automobile and improved highways, outlying areas also became convenient to reach. Since it usually is cheaper to build on undeveloped land ("green fields") than tearing down an old structure and rebuilding, both people and businesses started to migrate to the suburban areas as city structures aged, paying to extend the city's water and sewer services.

With the advent of the Part County Sewer District and its interceptor lines, far-flung localities were able to tap into the treatment plant located in Utica. These places could never have afforded on their own the level of service that they received. Since the vast bulk of the population lived in Utica, Utica residents paid for most of the cost of this system. In effect, Utica residents were financing suburban growth while encouraging the rotting of their city from within.

(Click here for the complete article from the Utica Phoenix.)

Posted by leo-c at 1:11 PM

November 8, 2008

A REGIONAL WATER UTILITY: BUSINESS-LIKE GOVERNANCE OR A WAY TO DODGE RESPONSIBILITY?

Mayor Sam Katz wants to create a regional water utility, to run Winnipeg's sewer and water systems, possibly taking over garbage disposal and recycling as well. The agency would operate independently of city council and, if it wished, market Winnipeg's water to adjacent municipalities.

The agency would set rates for the services it provides, applying to the provincial Public Utilities Board for permission to raise rates. Katz told the Winnipeg Free Press that "Handing this power over to the board would take politics out of the process." Good idea, eh? No more interference in these services from low-life politicians: just good, honest, business-like governance.

Wait a minute: It was a politician that proposed this. Why would a political leader want to hand over a substantial chunk of his responsibility to someone else? The answer can be found in the city's most recent six-year capital budget, which sets out the money that the city must invest in maintenance and improvement of its services.

Click here for capital budget summary.

The biggest liability on the list is $826 million for sewage disposal projects, a consequence of the provincial government's order to the city to clean up the water it dumps into the river system. Not far behind is $164 million for the water system. Imagine how much easier the mayor's life would be if future sewer and water rate increases, as well as sewage and water supply problems, could be blamed on the Public Utilities Board and the regional water agency.

Anyway, everyone seems to love the idea. The Winnipeg Free Press referred to it as "branching out". In a radio interview, a couple of political leaders in municipalities adjacent to Winnipeg voiced their strong support, and expressed their impatience with nonsensical arguments about sprawl.

Sprawl? Does this have something to do with sprawl? In trying to answer that question, it helps to bear in mind that industrial and commercial development requires the kind of generous and reliable water supply that only a municipal water system can deliver. Already all the municipalities surrounding Winnipeg are able to build their revenues by offering opportunities for residential development at substantially lower tax rates than the ones Winnipeg can offer.

Wouldn't it be nice if those municipalities could compete on similarly favourable terms for the Winnipeg region's industrial and commercial development? Indeed it would, for them. And for Winnipeg?

As it happens, I can draw you a picture of what the regional marketing of Winnipeg's water might hold in store for the city, because there is at least one precedent. After World War II, decision-makers in the thriving city of Detroit thought they had hit on a wonderful opportunity for revenue generation: Market their excellent municipal water supply regionally. In the years that followed, Detroit lost its mainstay, automobile manufacturing, in part to municipalities in the region. Residential and commercial development joined the exodus.

Detroit industrial buildings

A Detroit street

Detroit towers and homes

Today a visitor to Detroit can, if she ignores warnings from tourism advisors - as I did a few years ago - walk for hours through the empty streets, past the abandoned buildings of what remains of one of America's most dynamic cities. It's actually quite safe. The streets are so empty that, if you do meet someone, they'll probably stop and talk to you, and they may tell you stories about the grand hotels, and the tycoons, the jazz musicians and factory workers who used to jostle each other in the crowded streets of Detroit.

Of course, Winnipeg is not Detroit. No two city histories are identical. But what we can learn from Detroit is how rapidly and completely a city can be devastated by growth beyond its boundaries, even a major city like Detroit, never mind a medium-sized or smaller city like Winnipeg, Camden, N.J., East St. Louis, Illinois, and numerous others whose downtowns have been similarly ravaged. Given that potential, it makes no sense for Winnipeg voluntarily to give up one of the few development tools it controls, and turn it over to an agency that will have every incentive to meet its costs by promoting growth wherever possible, and no real incentive at all consider the city's ability to maintain its own viability.

It has been suggested that the sale of Winnipeg's water might be in the city's interest if adjacent municipalities were required to pay a substantial premium for the same service Winnipeg gets at a lower price, or that it might be all right if water were supplied on the stipulation that the adjacent municipalities could not use if for commercial or industrial development. The thing to remember is that, once water supply is turned over to an independent agency, such decisions will be out of the hands of either the citizens of Winnipeg or city council.

The independent water utility would be free to sell water to any municipality that wanted to buy it, and would have every incentive to do so at every opportunity. The setting of the price for the water service would be in the hands of the Public Utilities Board, also entirely beyond the control of Winnipeg's citizens or city council. The PUB would be unlikely to agree to differential rates for the same service.

••••••••••••••

You can find a detailed account of the evolution of water policies in metropolitan Detroit in:

George M. Walker, Jr., and Norman Wengert, Urban water policies and decision-making in the Detroit metropolitan region. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1970.

Posted by leo-c at 6:32 AM | Comments (1)

September 19, 2008

DOES RAPID TRANSIT FIGHT SPRAWL? NOT NECESSARILY

At last, after more than 30 years of vacillation and obstruction, it looks as if Winnipeg will finally get the first leg of a rapid transit system. Appropriately for a blue-collar town with a deeply-rooted culture of caution and frugality, it will be a low-budget diesel bus system, rather than a more expensive, classier and more environmentally friendly rail system. Nevertheless, it will open new opportunities for Winnipeg.

The system's most significant long-term benefit has been largely neglected in discussions leading to the decision to develop rapid transit. Potentially, a dedicated rapid transit line paves the way for new kinds of neighbourhoods that will be less dependent on automobiles around the clock, not just on the daily commute. That's because the existence of the transit line creates new incentives for the development of such neighbourhoods.

When a developer is choosing a location, and deciding what kind of development will go there, a major factor in the decision is access: How long will it take to get back and forth from the city centre, and what means of transportation are available? If accessibility is good and the main means of access is roads, chances are the developer will opt for single-family homes, and, since buyers of such homes usually like quiet neighbourhoods, the area will be exclusively residential, with shopping and jobs located elsewhere. Once settled in those neighbourhoods, the residents are almost totally dependent on their automobiles, because bus service is likely to be poor, and even the smallest daily errands will be run in a car.

Rapid transit opens up possibilities for a more urban style of development, a market that is generally under-served in Winnipeg: A denser neighbourhood consisting of a mix of homes, apartments, local shopping and public facilities, all within walking distance of the transit stop. Planners call such neighbourhoods transit-oriented development. People living there will have no need for two or three cars, because they will be able to do most of their daily business on foot, by transit, or on the bike path that will be developed parallel to the rapid transit line.

The potential benefits of a rapid transit line, therefore, go far beyond the convenience of a quick trip to work and back and the environmental benefits of reduced vehicle emissions on that trip. They also include:

• Reduced land consumption, resulting in less sprawl.

• Life-styles generally less oriented to automobile use - not just on the daily trip to work and back - and therefore less cars on the road and less filth in the air.

• More exercise and healthier bodies.

But those are potential benefits, not a sure thing, because there is an alternative. The land development around rapid transit stations can consist of parking lots instead of neighbourhoods. Political pressure for developing rapid transit this way will come from residents of auto-dependent suburbs who like their cars but would like to avoid some of the congestion on their daily commute.

Political pressure from suburbanites will be abetted by residents of neighbourhoods near transit stops who not only don't want to live in dense neighbourhoods, but are also fearful of the development of dense neighbourhoods nearby. What's more, rigid zoning and building code regulations may come down on the side of those who prefer asphalt to neighbourhoods. If asphalt lovers win the day, rapid transit, far from providing a counter to sprawl, may actually give it a boost, by improving the accessibility of ever more distant, auto-dependent suburbs.

Winnipeg is off to a good start in avoiding that fate, because financing for the first rapid transit line depends on revenues from a development next to the line that will presumably be transit-oriented. But that is only one short stretch of the line. There will be many opportunities for development at other points along the line. In a city as auto-dependent as Winnipeg, there are bound to be advocates for asphalt and opponents of density at those points. If we want Winnipeg's rapid transit system to be a sprawl fighter and a boon to the environment, rather than a gift to the petroleum industry, we had better be ready to make our case.

Posted by leo-c at 4:51 PM

July 14, 2008

WHY WOULD THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CUT A MONEY-MAKER?

A couple of months ago, I told the extraordinary story of how a local government tore up the federalism rule book and initiated a very promising tri-level government program for getting welfare recipients placed in good jobs. In this entry, I'd like to reflect on a curious aspect of that story that I didn't stress in my other account: The program was a conspicuous success in its first year, but the federal government cut it even though it had actually made money on it.

Russ Simmonds, The City of Winnipeg's director of social services, proposed the program in 1992, when unemployment was high, and the city was responsible for short-term welfare. Simmonds saw an opportunity to offer welfare recipients on-the-job training through an investment by all three levels of government in the restructuring and resurfacing of city roads, back lanes and sidewalks.

In a city with an infrastructure deficit that, in the mid-1990s, ran to the hundreds of millions – a crisis so serious that vehicle-sized sink-holes were appearing in the streets – the case for renewal was easily made. Simmonds's idea called for welfare recipients to do infrastructure repairs, learning on the job to become construction workers, with much of the work paid for out of money saved on welfare payments. After the Liberals came to power federally in 1993, the government agreed to fund the program for two years, with the costs to be split three ways by the three levels of government.

Since the project was designed at the local level, in partnership with the City’s Public Works Department, it was informed by awareness of the needs of both the local community and participants in the program, and it worked. Over the course of the program's first year, each level of government spent $759,266 on wages for social assistance recipients participating in the program, as well as their supervisors.

The total amount spent on wages was approximately $2.3 million. However, when calculated against the savings in social assistance accrued at each level of government, the project garnered $2.3 million worth of wages for $550,000. In fact, the federal government actually saved more in welfare costs than it spent on infrastructure renewal.

Work on the first year of the program took place over the summer of 1994 and, at the same tine, Finance Minister Paul Martin was wrestling with a massive federal government deficit by looking for cuts. One of the victims was Winnipeg's Infrastructure Renewal Program. Come again? you say. In order to save money the government cut a program that had produced savings of more than $100,000 in a year?

Exactly. How could such a thing have happened? A search for the answer would make a good Ph.D thesis topic, but if we know a little bit about how government works, it's not hard to speculate. One possible scenario: In the process of preparing next year's budget, an order goes out to government departments to prepare draft budgets reflecting cuts of X per cent. Each department goes to work looking for cuts. What to do? Cut back our own department or eliminate a budget item that gets spent at another level of government?

From the department's viewpoint, the temptation is ever-present: Down-load the cuts and let your colleagues live to fight another day. When cabinet approved the budget, it was probably not their intention to cut a money-saver - assuming that it really was a money-saver - but a government scrambling desperately to find billions will not be worrying about what, from its perspective, looks like nickels and dimes. With so much money and so many details to worry about, a perverse cut might not have been noticed at all.

There are other ways it could have happened. The point is that it can happen and it apparently did, and it is more likely to happen the bigger and more distant the government is. At the local level, such a cut would be much less likely to go unnoticed. This is only one of a number of reasons why it is important for local communities to be much more involved than they are in governance.

I'm not arguing for local autonomy. We need the power and the resources of the federal government, and sometimes we need the feds to ensure that we remain a united country, and one that treats its citizens fairly, regardless of where they live and who they are. But when it comes to ensuring that our good intentions as a nation are carried out in a manner appropriate to the different circumstances in different communities, we need a great deal more local participation.

The irony is that governance has moved in the opposite direction. Since the mid-1990s, short-term welfare has been removed from local hands and placed under the purview of the provincial government. Today, good ideas like the infrastructure renewal project are the responsibility of a government that is less likely to think of them in the first place, and more likely than local government to cut them in the unlikely event that someone does think of them.

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The story of Winnpeg's infrastructure renewal project is discussed in detail and compared with other welfare-to-work and workfare schemes in Christopher Leo and Todd Andres, “Unbundling Sovereignty in Winnipeg: Federalism through Local Initiative.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 41 (1) 2008, pp. 93-117.

Posted by leo-c at 7:48 PM | Comments (3)

June 28, 2008

BEAUTIFUL STADIUM PROPOSAL? HEADS UP FOR THE BAIT AND SWITCH

The Creswin Properties proposal for a new stadium and waterfront development in Winnipeg's South Point Douglas neighbourhood looks beautiful, doesn't it? There's no denying that, but maybe now it's time to take a look at what happened in Edmonton, when Triple Five Corporation made an irresistible offer to obtain a massive commitment of public funds and then used local politicians' commitment to keep them on-side, even as the more attractive features of the original offer were withdrawn, and its price increased.

You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be attracted to the beautiful images below, which appeared today in the Winnipeg Free Press. But as they admire the images, Winnipeg's citizens and decision-makers should bear a couple of other things in mind.

In the first place, don't lose sight of the fact that the Point Douglas neighbourhood, which has been through a lot of very hard times, has lately accomplished the difficult task of getting itself organized and attacking some of the problems that have plagued it. A massive public facility, with the inevitable multitudes of automobiles and crowds of people, leaving bottles, wrappers and chicken bones in their wake, is a huge liability to a residential neighbourhood.

Do the developers have anything better to offer the neighbourhood than rowdy football fans, broken glass and half-eaten corn dogs?

Citizens and decision-makers should also bear in mind that the pictures, by the developer's own admission, are just drawings, with no commitment behind them. If we're going to consider spending our hard-earned tax dollars to visit this development upon Point Douglas, we had better note what happened in Edmonton, - just one example of many such instances - and make sure that we learn from those mistakes.

Posted by leo-c at 5:03 PM

December 30, 2007

TALKING TO EACH OTHER INSTEAD OF SHOUTING: A DIALOGUE ABOUT SPRAWL AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT

Peter Holle, president of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a conservative think tank, responded to my comments in another blog entry with some remarks of his own about sprawl, and other issues of urban governance and development. In this entry, I reproduce most of his comments, in boldface, and follow them with my responses in italics.

I submit this entry as a beginning of what I hope can be a more extensive dialogue. Those of us who disagree on important questions of city politics have too often been self-indulgent in preaching to the converted, and ignoring our opponents. Genuine dialogue is much more likely to produce good policy than rigid adherence to set points of view.

PH: Sprawl is natural outgrowth of dispersing economy (communications and car technology, rising wealth levels). Policy makers largely waste time and resources trying to stop this.

CH: Whether that statement is true depends on what you mean by "sprawl". If you mean any extension of a city or metropolitan area that includes single-family residences, you're right. It's true globally that cities are growing and that many affluent home-buyers are looking for spacious homes and grounds as far from the city centre as possible.

However, there is room for a considerable proportion of low-density, single-family development, even with land use regulations aimed at limiting sprawl. Sprawl becomes toxic when low-density development gets preferential treatment so that it is, in effect, subsidized, and when low densities are combined with rules that require strict separation of land uses - keeping residential, commercial and industrial tracts of land strictly separated from each other.

That kind of development has the effect of limiting choice, by putting developers in the position of having to make financial sacrifices and fight bureaucratic battles if they wish to provide an alternative to conventional low-density, land-use-separated development. It puts home buyers in residential districts that are strictly separated from work and shopping in the position of being completely dependent on their automobiles for transportation. And it makes it impossible to provide convenient bus service except with unsustainable levels of subsidy. Finally it often strands the elderly, youth, poor people and disabled people, or makes them dependent on others for their transportation.

Land development is very strictly regulated, down to very small details. The suggestion that it represents the untrammeled operation of market forces is simply wrong. In fact, a true free market in land is an impossibility, because free markets presuppose, among other things, unlimited supply and the supply of land is by nature limited. Land use is always regulated and we have sprawl because our regulations require or encourage it.

PH: Insofar as we have sprawl it is artificial, an outgrowth of old style government policy. Our recommendations for curbing artificial sprawl include the measures set out in boldface below:

Tax land not improvements. The existing property tax system penalizes density.

CH: Your point, I take it, is that, since we tax buildings, and the improvement of them, development of land incurs a tax liability, while land that remains undeveloped and sparsely developed is very lightly taxed. That greatly weakens the incentive to develop the land and thereby works against density. It has long been advocated that either only land be taxed (the single tax), or that the tax on land be raised, while that on improvements is reduced (the split tax). If it becomes expensive to leave land lying idle, its owners will be more interested in developing it, so that it produces revenue.

These proposals are well worth considering. The split tax has been tested in a number of Pennsylvania cities, and there is a good case to be made in favour of it. As well, it could be argued that the main problem is that the split tax does not go far enough - that a single tax would have produced a better result. In practical political terms, some powerful oxen would be gored by either change. Perhaps we should be forging a left-right coalition to advocate for a reform of the property tax.

PH: Fund services with user fees not property taxes to catch free riders.

CH: Free riders are people who cause problems, but do not pay for them, and therefore have no incentive not to cause the problems. The classic free rider case is air pollution. Each automobile driver and each factory contribute to air pollution, but they do not pay to clean up the dirty air they have produced. As a result, virtuous citizens and companies that seek to reduce air pollution pay for their virtue, while those that continue to spew pollutants do not pay for their wrong-doing. The virtuous ones pay for cleaner air but continue to breathe dirty air.

Even the most starry-eyed market utopians - those who believe that virtually all political and social problems are best solved by the application of free market principles - agree that the free rider problem requires some kind of intervention from government. An obvious solution is to find a way of charging the polluters for their pollution, so that they are forced to pay for their sins.

That line of reasoning makes perfect sense for air pollution. It is more difficult to see how it applies to public parks, zoos and public libraries. Typically, these have been paid for initially and maintained with funds collected from taxpayers, and available for all to enjoy. Restricting access to them with user fees makes them available only to those who can afford to pay. Everyone pays taxes. To bar some of them from the use of public services that they have helped pay for seems unfair.

As for the free rider problem, it is difficult to see what harm is caused to public parks, community centres and public libraries by opening them to the public at large, without restriction. By the same token, there is a potential public benefit in providing opportunities for recreation and literacy to people who cannot afford to pay. And sprawl? Will the proceeds of user fees be used to finance anti-sprawl measures? My advice to readers is not to bet the farm on that proposition.

PH: Increase efficiency of city services using modern delivery models.

CH: I'm in favour of that as long as it's not a fancy way of saying "cheap labour". Following on the publication of Osborne and Gaebler's Reinventing Government, many improvements have been made in the delivery of city services by using newer administrative techniques, including some that involve methods imported from private enterprise. The result has been both increased efficiency and lower cost.

Unfortunately, some of the lower costs have been achieved by forcing wages down, typically by exposing unionized city workers to competition from private contractors who pay lower wages. As a result, workers who had enough money to be able to buy the many things their children needed in order to get a good start in life are now less able, or entirely unable, to do that.

Low wages - not only in the delivery of municipal services, but generally - are a good way of reducing the life chances of the next generation, by putting today's parents in the position of not being able to afford to give their kids the care and education they need. This is a very short-sighted policy, which, in the long run, incurs both economic and social costs.

PH: Remove rent controls and target assistance to low income earners in order to make housing affordable for them.

CH: I agree that the case for rent controls is weak, because it involves a transfer of wealth from landlords to tenants, which is not at all the same as a transfer of wealth from the wealthy to the poor. In addition, it may reduce the incentive to maintain rental dwellings. But we shouldn't kid ourselves that removal of rent controls will free us of the need to make some public provision for affordable housing, and social housing. Affordable housing is not what developers make money on.

As for targeting housing money to low income earners, that's one of several ways of dealing with the fact that, in most cities, even some people who work hard may not be able to afford shelter. We can't do justice here to this complex issue. Let's take it up another time.

PH: Encourage development in the centre city, with the objective of supporting it more as an interesting living place and less as a shopping and working place.

CH: I don't think that downtown needs to be less a working and shopping place than it is now, but I do agree that we need to place heavy emphasis on housing, including affordable housing, in the development of the commercial heart of the city. That, in turn, will open more possibilities for retail trade - in other words, shopping. For the city as a whole, perhaps the most important single planning objective should be to take sensible measures to reduce as much as possible the existence of areas that are exclusively devoted to any one use.

The most recent Winnipeg zoning code revisions - like those in many other North American cities - take some modest but useful steps in this direction. Like affordable housing, this is another critically important but complex issue that we should resolve to discuss in more detail another time.

PH: Zoning restrictions on supply and disproportionate investments in light rail/mass transit are yesterday's answers. They simply push people to live outside the zoned area, penalize home owners by artifically raising house prices, and otherwise waste scarce resources that should be used for other transport infrastructure.

CH: Zoning restrictions and investments in public transit are two different issues. I agree that conventional zoning is too restrictive. As I argue above, conventional zoning in effect mandates sprawl. We need to make it much easier for developers to do infill development and to offer suburban choices that are different from the familiar pattern of large residential areas, strictly separated from shopping and workplaces.

As for public transit, Winnipeg has a system that continues to be generally efficient, despite the fact that it has been poorly supported. We need to support transit and improve it, in order to reduce dependence on private automobiles and to enhance the freedom of the young, the elderly, the poor and the disabled, as well as their ability to control their lives and provide for their livelihoods. As I argue elsewhere, this is not as hard to do as many would have you believe.

Want to find out more?

Alanna Hartzok defends the split tax in "Pennsylvania's Success with Local Property Tax Reform: The Split Rate Tax", American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 56, No. 2, 205-213 (Apr., 1997). Unfortunately, this issue is seriously under-researched.

On new service delivery models, see David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector, New York: Penguin, 1993. This is a readable classic that, for better or worse, foreshadowed a great deal of what has gone on in municipal government since it was published.

Posted by leo-c at 5:10 PM

December 3, 2007

A NEO-CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION FROM BELOW? WATCH OUT, CANADA

Winnipeg's Sam Katz, who has been mayor since shortly after Glen Murray resigned in 2004, is worth watching. It's not clear whether he is a fire-breathing neo-conservative or - as the Winnipeg Free Press's astute city hall observer, Bartley Kives insists - a moderate, but lately there have been some straws in the wind, and they may herald a new direction in Canadian urban politics, one that could be emulated in other cities.

Mayor Katz (rhymes with "dates") has set the objective of eliminating the business tax, leaving a $55 million budget hole that must be filled in ways not clearly specified. He is a shrewd, sophisticated political operator, who, so far, has commanded city council votes with apparent ease, and side-steps embarrassing questions with the finesse of a magician making a coin disappear. He is also a skilled practitioner of budget magic, as we will see.

So what does that have to do with a social revolution? Stay tuned.

In order to consider the question of how the $55 million budget hole will be filled, the mayor appointed the so-called Economic Opportunity Commission (EOC). The EOC claimed to have consulted widely before returning its recommendations last June, but most of those who made presentations were city councillors or city officials. Subsequently, the EOC report was made part of the budget process, without further public scrutiny.

The mayor and his supporters will bend every effort to avoid public debate about the policy directions involved in achieving the savings needed to abolish the business tax. Indeed, it would be naïve to suppose that a city council embarking on a plan to improve the fortunes of one group of citizens to the tune of $55 million a year will be particularly forthcoming with those who will carry the burden.

It is up to voters, therefore, to look out for themselves, to follow those coins, as they move from one budget category to another, and to try to understand the implications for Winnipeg's future. In doing so, it is important to take a critical look at some of the possible sources of savings. For starters, city council has approved a transit fare increase, from $2.00 to $2.25, which is expected to yield an additional $2.2 million annually in revenue. Some of that money, according to the mayor, will go to increased costs, but an undetermined amount will be put into a reserve fund for a future rapid transit system.

So, an undetermined portion of $2.2 million will go into a fund to pay for a transit system the cost of which Mayor Katz estimates at $300 million to $1 billion. Since the mayor has already demonstrated his unwillingness to consider funding rapid transit in the conventional way, one transit line at a time, it seems less than certain that there will ever be a rapid transit system. If so, what will happen to the reserve fund? Will the money slip quietly into general revenues, or go to lessening the cost of another reserve fund, and in the end help indirectly to pay for the tax cut, or future tax cuts? The question is worth asking.

Similar manipulations have been a regular feature of Winnipeg's budget process in the past, and Mayor Katz bids fair to be even better at it than his predecessors. For example, when federal gas tax funds were made available to municipalities, Winnipeg was required to put a minimum of 10% of the money into transit. Katz has recently gained favourable publicity by investing in bus shelters, hybrid buses, and diamond lanes.

However, when the draft capital budget was announced in late November, ongoing revenue from the transit-targeted gas tax funds were quietly shifted into the "Transit Building Replacement Reserve". In plain English, the transit improvement money was shifted into public works. And what has happened to the money previously allocated to transit buildings? Voters and skeptical councillors would be well advised to follow those coins.

City council has also passed an 11.6 per cent increase in water and sewer rates. The money is supposedly needed to help pay for a $300 million water treatment plant, but, at the same time, the transfer from water and sewer rate revenues into the general fund is to be increased by $11.1 million, bringing the total being diverted annually to $32.5 million. The money, it should be noted, is being diverted from sewerage improvements at a time when the city is under a legal obligation to invest heavily in a seriously deficient sewer system.

To be sure, under pressure from opposition Councillor Dan Vandal, Katz revived a broken election promise to end the practice of diverting water and sewer revenues into the general fund, but not this year. In any event, we are hardly likely to have seen the last of this kind of budget sleight of hand.

Other possible sources of savings are set out in the EOC report. Five million dollars was to come from selling off pools and fitness centres, turning them over to voluntary associations or contracting out the services. With regard to sell-offs or conveyance to voluntary associations, we need to ask ourselves whether we want these services to be viewed as businesses that have to turn a profit, or to keep them as a public service available to everyone, including those who can’t afford a fitness club membership.

Another $2 million in savings was to come from the library system. Here two recommendations are notable. One is to make more use of volunteers. This might work with a few marginal items like reading programs, but do we want volunteers to do any of the more technical jobs involved in library maintenance? The other notable recommendation is to partner with schools where library branches and schools are located close together. How would that work? Would school children have to go to the local library branch for their school library needs, or would library patrons have to go into schools?

Neither option seems feasible. A more likely outcome would be the closing down of library branches, with the justification that students using it would be able to use their school library instead. In fairness, Mayor Katz has provided a verbal assurance that savings from pools, fitness centres and libraries are “off the table”. But, in view of the fact that a total of $7 million in savings were anticipated, it is worth remembering that something taken off a table can be replaced.

Another recommendation of the EOC report reads: “Sell off or tender out the management of the city’s golf courses.” The report also recommends that the city consider off-loading the costs of various city services in commercial districts on the members of Business Improvement Zones. Included in the list of services the EOC feels BIZs might be asked to pay for are street and bus shelter cleaning and enforcement of panhandling and vagrancy by-laws. Golfers and small business people take note: the business tax reduction is a potential source of worry for a lot of people besides the usual suspects from the social activist community.

The EOC report further recommends that the city undertake a “pilot project” in off-loading the costs of some city services to neighbourhood associations. It claims that around the world such associations “raise billions of dollars every year in order to support local projects such as pools, play structures, park maintenance, street cleaning and a number of other services.”

If readers of the report are having difficulty imagining the residents of a suburban subdivision voluntarily agreeing to fund some of their own services in order to unburden the city, they may wish to reflect on the situation of homeowner or community associations, popularly known as gated communities, which supply some of their own services. This is common practice in many American jurisdictions. When the idea of community associations was first proposed, municipal officials were delighted at the potential savings.

The other side of the coin, however is that neighbourhoods supplying their own services thereby build a case for property tax cuts. This has become a major issue in the United States and, in at least one state, New Jersey, anti-double-taxation legislation requires municipal governments to refund the costs of services supplied by homeowner associations. The best-case outcome of this course of events is a city studded with barricaded enclaves of privilege. The worst case is a municipal government with an eroding tax base, struggling to maintain services in moderate and low-income neighbourhoods. Before we start down this road, we had better take a good look at where it leads.

These and similar items could be walked onto the city council floor one by one, and, if Katz is successful, there is no reason why similar events could not unfold in other cities. What we are looking at here is a potentially substantial agenda of social change from below. At one level, Mayor Katz's budget magic makes interesting political theatre. But in an overview of the actual issues involved, there are serious questions at stake: What value do we place on quality public services? How much do we care about a transit system's contribution to clean air and the role of sewerage in ensuring a pure water supply? Will we stand by while our community fragments into a series of enclaves of privilege and poverty ghettos?

Does a revolution from below, engineered by local government, sound far-fetched? Consider what happened when the Thatcher government in Britain gave local governments the right to sell council (public) housing. In a single stroke, newly-minted property owners became Tory voters, affordable housing became a much bigger problem than before, and fundamental social change was set in train. Roy Hattersley, author and former Labour cabinet minister, sets out very clearly and succinctly, in a 2002 Guardian article, how it happened.

Those of us who care about the Canadian society that has been bequeathed to us by the likes of Tommy Douglas and Mike Pearson - and all the rest of us - will be well advised to take an interest in the boring subject of municipal budgeting, and to think through the final implications of a municipal tax-cutting agenda. If we don’t, we may wake up one day to find ourselves living in very different cities, and a different country, than the one we know now.

Want to find out more? For a discussion of the political and social issues surrounding neighbourhood associations, take a look at:

Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner associations and the rise of residential private government. New Haven: Yale University, 1994.

There is a veritable library on the sale of British council houses, and the implications for Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and neo-conservatism. Here are three items, representing a variety of viewpoints:

Paul Pierson, Dismantling the welfare state? Reagan, Thatcher, and the politics of retrenchment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Cliff Hague, "The development and politics of tenant participation in British council housing". Housing Studies, 5 (4), October 1990 , 242-56.

David Marsh and R. A. W. Rhodes, "Implementing Thatcherism: Policy change in the 1980s". Parliamentary Affairs 45 (1), 33-50.

Posted by leo-c at 10:58 AM

June 12, 2007

THINKING A LITTLE HARDER ABOUT URBAN CRIME

Superficial research produces one-dimensional, sterile debate. A case in point is crime in North American cities. Much of the commentary we read and hear focuses on two opposing positions, neither of which resonates with common sense.

One side of the argument is represented by hard-nosed crime fighters. Their argument comes in two parts. First, they advocate cracking down on petty offenders - squeegee kids, panhandlers, vandals and the like - and maintain that the result will be a decrease in major crime. Secondly, they call for computer-assisted rapid response, whereby police descend upon an area where there has been a succession of offences in order to clamp down on the offenders. Winnipeg has lately adopted this strategy, referring to it as CrimeStat.

The crime-fighting approach is often associated with the name of Rudy Guiliani, the former mayor of New York City, who presided over the implementation of such tactics and was able to point to a substantial reduction in crime rates. The figures seem convincing, but common sense raises an antenna. How likely is it actually that cracking down on squeegee kids or scribblers of graffiti will stop future car theft rings, international drug cartels and murderers in their tracks?

As for the rapid response tactic, although speeding to the scene of previous crimes might help in going after neighbourhood-based gangs, one can't help but wonder how likely it is that, as a generality, a particular area of a city will be the scene of a number of attempted crimes in the next hour because it has been the scene of a number of crimes in the past hour. At best, the cause-and-effect connections here seem murky.

Unsatisfactory as that side of the argument seems, the rejoinder is not much better. Here we commonly encounter three lines of argument. The first questions the validity of crime statistics, pointing out, plausibly, that it is difficult to distinguish between changes in actual crime rates and changes in the frequency with which crimes are reported. A second line of argument relies on these allegedly unreliable statistics to argue that overall crime rates are decreasing throughout North America for demographic reasons: an aging population and an accompanying decline in average energy and testosterone levels, leading to a decline in lawlessness in general and violence in particular. In other words, we worry too much.

The third line of argument makes the indisputable point that prisons breed criminals, thus calling the effectiveness of enforcement itself into question. These arguments, like those of the crime-fighters, seem to carry a considerable amount of weight, but at the same time we know that declining crime rates are not quite the same thing as being safe in our homes and in the streets. As for the ineffectiveness of prison: Point taken, but what is the alternative? Are we to do nothing about crime?

In the matter of urban crime, my perspective is that of an informed amateur. I claim no special expertise, but it is part of my job to stay abreast of urban issues, and, after a lifetime of research, I think I can spot the symptoms of superficial research. I don't have better answers than the experts do, but I have suspected for some time that either the experts are not doing their homework, or their homework is not being reflected in the public debate.

The latter suspicion was reinforced by a fascinating and suggestive article in a recent issue of the Urban Affairs Review. The literature review that introduces the article makes it clear that there is quite a lot of good research that has not been reflected in the public debate. The article itself, by John Hagedorn and Brigid Rauch, is underpinned by superb, in-depth research of how crime rates are influenced by less obvious factors than those that are considered in the public debates. The study focuses on how the organization of criminal gangs and local public housing policies has interacted with crime rates.

The article uses these data to try to explain why similar enforcement policies and similar social environments in Chicago and New York in the 1990s produced falling crime rates in New York and rising ones in Chicago. In the process the authors show how imaginative and assiduous research can shed new light on tiresome, one-dimensional old debates.

The first finding is that Chicago's criminal gangs were highly institutionalized, meaning that they had deep ties to the communities they were part of and organizational structures that survived generational change. New York gangs lacked similarly high levels of institutionalization. As a result, when New York police went after the gangs, they actually succeeded in breaking them up and halting many of their activities. In Chicago, the more highly institutionalized gangs, instead of being broken up by police enforcement, were fragmented and fell to fighting amongst themselves. The result was that police enforcement actually resulted in temporary increases in violence, rather than the decreases that occurred in New York.

The second finding has to do with different housing policies in Chicago and New York. In New York, in the wake of the devastating decay of the South Bronx - which, for a time, turned that area into a wasteland - the city chose to respond by pumping an unprecedented $5 billion into the development of 182,000 units of affordable housing. This enabled residents and former residents of the South Bronx to stay in or return to their old neighbourhoods, and presumably to maintain community ties that lent some stability to their lives.

In Chicago, meanwhile, rather than reconstructing housing in previously devastated neighbourhoods, the city "decided to demolish the high-rise housing projects that had been built in the 1960s. Demolishing these projects represented a massive displacement of people." (p. 447) These areas were gentrified, or commercialized, as Chicago's downtown Loop, the city's commercial heart, expanded to occupy the vacant land. Thus, while the residents of 182,000 housing units in New York were enabled to stay put, "in Chicago, demolition of public housing has resulted in the... displacement of more than a hundred thousand African-American public housing residents." (p. 448) For the most part, those displaced had no alternative other than to move to other distressed neighbourhoods. "These neighbourhoods," the authors observe "...are also the areas in Chicago of the highest rates of homicide." (p. 449)

Hagedorn's and Rauch's research not only pushes the investigation of the causes of urban crime into previously unexploited areas, but also shows that the contrast between Chicago and New York is not unique to those two communities. Throughout the article, the authors adduce examples of similar situations in other cities around the world. Their research does not, in any simplistic way, offer solutions to the problems posed by urban crime, but it does suggest that, if researchers put their imaginations to work and dig more deeply, we may well develop strategies far more sophisticated than those suggested by the sterile crime-and-punishment debate that has, up to now, limited our understanding of the problem.

Want to find out more?

The findings summarized in this blog entry are carefully documented in John Hagedorn and Brigid Rauch, "Housing, gangs and homicide: What we can learn from Chicago", Urban Affairs Review 42 (4) (March 2007), pp. 435-56.

Posted by leo-c at 4:07 PM

January 5, 2007

WHY AND HOW CITY POLITICIANS AND THE PUBLIC ARE MISLED BY OFFICIALS

This is the third in a series of articles about how poorly the public interest is represented by many Canadian municipal governments. In a previous entry, I showed how developers are able to bend our representatives to their will and in this entry I will provide an example of how public servants do it.

In both entries I use a careful examination of a particular case as my medium. These cases are not unusual events. On the contrary, I chose to examine them in detail, and nail down exactly what happened, because they seemed to be typical of situations I have observed repeatedly in case studies of urban development issues in Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver, Portland, Oregon and other cities.

The suggestion that developers could be motivated to promote their own interests over those of the public will come as no surprise. Their job is to make money and their responsibility is to their shareholders, not the public. But some readers may find the suggestion that public servants could also promote a narrow interest at the expense of that of the public harder to swallow. Therefore, let's look at what their motivations might be.

It's important to begin by remembering that no one is objective. We all carry our biases with us. Many of these are based on our professional or occupational training. The expression, "to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail", sums it up nicely. Similarly, to many road builders, speed and ease of automobile access is the primary urban development concern.

Most engineering designers and managers now at the peak of the profession were educated in engineering faculties where the dominant tendency was to think of road-building as a technical matter, in which road design involved the projection of traffic demands and the efficient accommodation of that traffic at a manageable cost. In that climate of thought, the suggestion that there is a social and an environmental dimension to road-bulding was not taken seriously and, when such suggestions came from politicians or members of the public, they were resented as “political interference” and as an assault on the engineers’ professional integrity. This belief-system is still very much in evidence, especially among the decision-makers in municipal public works departments.

The ideas about road systems that are being applied in North American cities typically have two sources that are important for our purposes: developer proposals and the traditional norms and conventions of civil engineering. The contribution of developers is that they decide on the parcels of land that they see as profitable spots for development and propose them to the city. In Winnipeg and many other cities they have good reason to expect a sympathetic hearing from local government.

It then becomes the obligation of the city to work out the development of the rest of the city’s transportation system to accommodate recent and expected future development. For example, a burgeoning of new subdivisions at Winnipeg’s southern edge in South St Vital and South St Boniface contributed to a city decision to build an expressway serving that part of the city - Bishop Grandin Boulevard - and occasioned the opening-up of an under-used and heavily subsidized bus line into Island Lakes, one of the new subdivisions. It also eventually stimulated the replacement of the Norwood and Main Street bridges with a massive new eight-lane structure. These bridges, located downtown, are part of the road system leading to the newer southern subdivisions.

While money was readily available for these extensions of the transportation infrastructure, as as well as a long list of other, similar extensions in all directions from the centre of the city, funds for the maintenance of existing infrastructure dwindled. A meticulous 1998 survey of the state of Winnipeg’s infrastructure found a massive disparity between the amount needed to maintain existing infrastructure and the amount actually being spent. Regional streets, for example were found to be $10.2 m a year short of the required amount. Even more drastic was the situation of residential streets, which were found to have benefited from an average annual budgeted expenditure of $2.5 m, compared with a requirement of $30 m, a disparity of $27.5 m. The overall infrastructure deficit was estimated at $1 billion or more.

In all of these respects, Winnipeg was following the conventions of modern North American city-building: developers decide where they want to locate new development and pay for some of the services immediately required by the new subdivisions. The city ensures that they become connected into the city-wide service network, and that the city-wide network is expanded as necessary to accommodate them. It is in deciding on the character of this expansion that long-established norms of the engineering profession take over.

“EASY DECISIONS”

Many examples could be found, but a recent case in point was that of the Norwood Bridge, an inner city-suburban link referred to above. When the plans for the Norwood Bridge reconstruction were being mooted, city officials presented four alternatives, including the following two: It would cost $78 m for a six-lane, divided bridge that was pictured as providing a “fair” level of safety, and “poor” traffic capacity, accommodation for transit and accommodation of traffic during construction. By contrast, an eight-lane, divided bridge that was rated “good” in all four categories would cost only $80 m. That was an easy decision: only $2 m extra for a vastly superior bridge.

Such “easy decisions” are standard items in the arsenal of public servants who have made up their minds about which course they wish their political masters and the public to pursue. Council chose an eight-lane bridge, and it soon became obvious - as it often does in such cases - that the “easy choice” was not so easy after all. By 1998, the cost of the new bridge had escalated to $102 m. And with only one of the two spans built - still less than the six-lane alternative that was portrayed as inadequate - traffic line-ups at rush hour had greatly eased. The final cost of eight-lane span was $113 million, $33 million more than originally promised.

Over-building of bridges and roads exacerbates the dilemmas Winnipeg will face in future. Increased road and bridge capacity has two consequences: First, an improved route draws traffic as it becomes the route of choice for drivers who previously favoured other routes. Sooner or later, this increases pressure on city council for further road works. For example, traffic line-ups on a bridge may be replaced by tie-ups on narrower roads leading to and from the bridge. Such consequences are not unanticipated by engineering staff, and resulting public demands for widening of the road leading away from the bridge may be seen by them as long-overdue recognition of necessities they understood to begin with.

A second consequence of increased bridge and road capacity is reduced travel time to the urban fringe, which leads to an increase in the economic viability of sprawl and leap-frog development. The upshot is intensified political pressure from developers for the approval of subdivisions that will be costly to serve. And once the new, typically low-density, auto-dependent subdivisions are built, they provide a fresh supply of citizens who have no convenient means of getting around other than the private automobile. It is a vicious cycle, in which each new attempt to solve the problem of allegedly inadequate road capacity has the ultimate effect of exacerbating it.

The high priority accorded road projects tends to crowd out alternatives. In Winnipeg, city council has readily agreed to one road project after another, heedless of the fact that each one exacerbates the sprawl dilemma. Meanwhile, transit facilities that could contribute to the amelioration of sprawl are postponed indefinitely. Since the mid-1970s, plans have been underway for the construction of the Southwest Transit Corridor, a rapid transit line consisting of cost-effective diesel buses running on a concrete strip dedicated exclusively to transit.

This line is considered viable because it connects two population concentrations - downtown and the University of Manitoba - along the relatively heavily-populated Pembina Highway corridor. It would ameliorate traffic congestion along Pembina Highway - the artery connecting the University of Manitoba with the inner city - and encourage cost-effective, compact development along the route, in contrast to road and bridge projects’ encouragement of sprawl. Estimated total cost for the entire facility would have been $70 million in 1997 - less than the lower-cost alternative for the Norwood Bridge, which was deemed inadequate. However, postponement of rapid transit has been a routine feature of City Council’s annual budget deliberations for at least two decades, and remains so in 2007.

ALTERNATIVES

In short, Winnipeg's city council, and many others, neglect their duty to the interest of the city as a whole when they accept the norms of traditionally-minded civil engineers as the final word on the extension of transportation infrastructure. As well, instead of, in effect, delegating to developers the right to decide where the city will expand, cities could exercise their authority to determine the location of new subdivisions. In theory, that power is being exercised now by city councils through their planning departments, but in practice the main influence over those decisions rests with developers and road-building specialists.

Winnipeg could have developed very differently. It seems very likely that the Norwood Bridge project could reasonably have been much more modest than it was. With a less auto-dependent, more compact form of development, the suburban road system - of which Bishop Grandin is only one example - could have been less extensive, and the transit system less of a drain on the treasury. In their development of roads, as well as the full range of other municipal services, Winnipeg, like other cities, is expanding rapidly, at ever lower densities, primarily in response to developers’ calculations about where the profit picture looks favourable for them, without serious consideration of how all of these developments will be tied together with infrastructure and serviced.

Winnipeg's suburbs sprawl, its inner city decays and the costs of servicing all of this uncontrolled development spiral out of control. As with any political discontent, the causes of this state of affairs are complex, but a very important cause is the inability of our local political institutions fully to address the complexities of the problems that face us.

•••••••••••••••••

Want to find out more? This article draws on research presented in Christopher Leo, “The North American Growth Fixation and the Inner City: Roads Of Excess.” World Transport Policy & Practice, 4 (4) 1998, 24-29. The article was reprinted in John Whitelegg and Gary Haq, eds, The Earthscan Reader on World Transport Policy and Practice. London: Earthscan Publications, 2003, ch 20.

A very useful source is Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck (New York: North Point Press, 2000), especially chapter 5.

Two books by Anthony Downs are helpful as well. The first (Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-hour Traffic Congestion. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1992) treats traffic congestion as a problem in its own right. In the second (New visions for Metropolitan America. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994) Downs expands his field of view, placing traffic problems in the wider perspective of metropolitan development, and reaching some different conclusions.

Evidence that there are alternatives to the sad state of affairs in Winnipeg, and many other cities, may be found in the Oregon Department of Transportation's Western Bypass study: Alternatives Analysis (Portland, OR, 1995) and in 1000 Friends of Oregon's Making the Connections: A Summary of the LUTRAQ Project (Portland, Oregon, 1997).

Posted by leo-c at 7:16 PM

November 26, 2006

THE GREEN PARTY OF WINNIPEG: HOW TO HAVE AN IMPACT

Winnipeg has a green party, consisting of a small but committed group of people who are determined to exercise an influence on the city's future. This may actually be possible. Public awareness of environmental issues appears to be growing, while disenchantment with business as usual in city hall is always there to be tapped. But it will be very difficult.

One of the problems the party must face is the long-standing bias against political parties in local government. As I point out elsewhere, parties are seen by many as counter-productively disputatious representatives of special interests, insufficiently concerned with common-sense governance in the interests of the city as a whole. The Green Party of Winnipeg has an opportunity to overcome that bias, but to do so it must move beyond purely environmental concerns, such as opposition to sprawl and pesticides, and consider how an environmental perspective can be at the heart of a platform that addresses the needs of the city as a whole.

Following are a few of the many questions party members may wish to consider if they hope to build their movement into a truly effective political instrument.

SPRAWL

The party is of course opposed to sprawl, and says so in its platform, but what to do about it? The party's platform states: "Planning focus will shift to reinvestment in existing neighbourhoods rather than developer-driven new ones; redevelopment will replace development as the preferred option."

That's not a plank for a platform, it's a sentiment. It’s not enough to prefer infill development to conventional suburban development, because a platform needs to be capable of passing muster as a business plan. A lot of home buyers don’t want infill housing, but do want to live in a conventional suburban neighbourhood. Advocacy of and support for infill development in inner-city neighbourhoods is in itself laudable, but it does not answer the question of where conventional suburban housing will be located.

Winnipeg can in fact accommodate new neighbourhoods in the suburban style in a manner that limits sprawl a great deal more than current land use policies do. If the Green Party wishes its position on sprawl to be taken seriously, it must say how it intends to do this.

LAND USE IN THE WINNIPEG REGION

The Green Party's call for additional development charges on new fringe development makes a lot of sense. There is a very reasonable case to be made for the proposition that current development cost structures in effect subsidize new subdivisions at the expense of the rest of the city. But this question cannot be addressed in isolation from the question of land use in the Winnipeg region as a whole, because, in the absence of a regional policy, additional development costs within the City of Winnipeg will simply drive development into urbanizing municipalities adjacent to the city.

Therefore, the Green Party must also have a regional land use policy. It could, for example, advocate the creation of a regional government, or increased provincial regulation of land use outside the city, or possibly a tax surcharge on municipalities outside the city, to be rebated to the city in order to help cover the costs of services the city now provides free of charge to users from outside the city. Each of these approaches has advantages and disadvantages, but without some approach to regional land use issues, the Green Party's approach to new subdivisions is not workable.

PORK PRODUCTION

At last report, the City of Winnipeg was hoping to seal a deal with pork processor OlyWest for the location of a major new hog processing facility in Winnipeg. The Green Party does not have an official position on this initiative, but within the party there is much anti-OlyWest sentiment. If the party opposes OlyWest, it should also consider what alternative policy it supports. Does the party wish simply to leave pork production to other communities, or will it advocate a different way of producing pork? A related question concerns employment. Most of the employees of OlyWest would be immigrants and Winnipeg has a substantial population of immigrants. If the Green Party proposes not to create these jobs, it should also consider its position on job creation for immigrants.

OPEN SPACE POLICY

It would make a lot of sense for the party to consider how it can expand the appeal of environmental concerns beyond the constituency of committed environmentalists. One way of doing this would be to advocate the development of a comprehensive open space policy covering everything from parks and community gardens to parking lots, empty lots and rail lines. Such a policy could facilitate the transformation of a patchwork of different types of open spaces into a system of pathways, recreational spaces and greenways, which would also be available as paths for leisurely walks and commuter routes for bicycles and pedestrians. Many Winnipeggers who are less concerned than Green Party members with the ills of the environment might find such a policy attractive for other reasons.

BUSINESS

Whether the Green Party and I like it or not, the business community is always a major force in municipal politics. There is no need to pander cravenly to everything the Chamber of Commerce demands, but without a platform that is capable of drawing some support from the business community, chances of implementing a program are slim to none. The Green Party platform should include provisions regarding taxes, land use regulation and other issues that concern business owners and managers. In developing such provisions, Green Party members might wish to ask themselves how at least some tax and land use regulations could be good for both business and the environment. My next suggestion is one of many items the party might wish to consider in that context.

GREEN BUILDINGS

The Green Party platform calls for a green buildings policy, but the wording suggests that that would apply only to city buildings. The energy savings that go with green buildings also save money. Can the Green Party work out a way of creating a loan fund - possibly in co-operation with Manitoba Hydro and the Manitoba provincial government - for retrofitting buildings to make them energy-efficient, with the loans to be repaid out of the savings on energy costs? If a workable program along these lines were developed, it would be bound to draw support, not only from the business community, but also from people in the construction trades.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

These are only a few of the questions the Green Party of Winnipeg must consider if it hopes to be seen as a real political party, fit to run the city, and not just as a special-interest group. It must also decide how it would pay for addressing Winnipeg's infrastructure deficit, how it would manage its relations with the provincial government, what to do about affordable housing, and more. All of these questions can be considered from an environmental perspective. In so doing, the party should be able to build and strengthen its program for environmental protection, while at the same time demonstrating its fitness to govern.

Posted by leo-c at 11:38 AM

November 19, 2006

WHAT'S WRONG WITH MUNICIPAL POLITICAL PARTIES?

In Canadian city politics, a fully-fledged party system, with a ruling party and a well-organized opposition, is a rarity. In the eyes of much of the public, parties are viewed with suspicion. Party discipline is seen as replacing common-sense problem-solving with knee-jerk disputatiousness while restricting the ability of politicians to stand up for the interests of their constituents.

From this point of view, non-partisan municipal politics is marked by the exercise of individual good judgement, intelligent compromise and responsiveness of politicians to the wishes of constituents, while partisan politics is blighted by shrill argumentation and mindless submission to party dictates. Often parties are also seen as representing special interests, while non-partisan politicians are thought to be more likely to be tuned in to the interests of the city as a whole.

And yet, politicians keep organizing themselves. In Toronto, it is normal to think of city council as comprising a left wing and a right wing. Montreal and Vancouver have for decades had ruling parties, whether or not there is a functioning opposition. In Winnipeg, formal and informal business parties and opposition parties periodically appear on the scene, only to disappear again. In a bow to public opinion, organized groups of councillors often insist that they are just good people working together, not political parties, but organize themselves they do again and again.

Why do politicians risk public displeasure in this way? The most fundamental answer is that politics is inherently an organized activity. Policies grow out of a process of coalition-building, which is central to all politics, whether democratic or not. A coalition is any group of people in the political arena who have managed to find enough common ground and forge enough compromises to be able to make common cause in pursuit of an objective they have agreed upon.

Within such a coalition there’s usually a core group that wields particularly strong influence. Often it has to find ways of offering incentives to others to come on board - things like contracts to supply goods or carry out projects, job opportunities, or the opportunity to do more business once a project is complete.

These incentives are called side payments and they are the glue that holds a coalition together. Side payments can take many forms. The politicians whose co-operation is needed may be told that a desired project will gain votes, or that there will be a nice job waiting after the inevitable defeat. In a case like that, the benefit in question may not be connected with the desired project. It can be anything a coalition member has available to give away. Union leaders may be guaranteed that their members will get a given share of the work involved in the project, or given other work. Leaders of ethnic or community groups will be offered benefits for their followers, or for themselves.

The term “side payments” could be taken to imply bribery – and it could actually be bribery – but in political systems that are not fundamentally corrupted most side payments are not bribery. They are simply any benefit that flows naturally from a project agreed upon, or that advocates of the project can make available in order to gain allies. It is this process of coalition-building, whereby a variety of different kinds of benefits are traded for support, that most fundamentally determines political outcomes.

This same process is at work behind the scenes in any legislative body, including city councils. In the case of a legislative body with a system of parties and party discipline, the process appears not to be operating, because the party leader calls the tune and party members must dance to it. This apparent unanimity, however, masks the fact that the leader, in order to survive, must maintain the support of party members. Within the party, therefore, the process of bargaining and reconciliation continues out of the public eye.

These observations go against democratic myth, and some of the more simplistic versions of democratic theory, which hold that political outcomes are determined by elections and polls. To be sure, elections and polls set limits beyond which politicians dare not venture, because they want to be re-elected. But most of the substance of policies pursued by governments is a product of coalition-building, in which both politicians, and organized groups outside the formal political arena are engaged.

If one accepts the suggestion that coalition-building - reconciliation of differences and organization in pursuit of common objectives - is the essence of politics, the question is not whether political decision-making will be a matter individual common sense or blind adherence to party dictates. It is, rather, whether all coalition-building will take place behind closed doors, or whether some of it will be out in the open, in the form of competing party platforms, available for voter scrutiny and choice.

The harsh reality of the world we live in is that some people are organized and others are not. The best organized ones are the holders of economic power, or those who benefit from the support of such bodies as professional associations, business lobbies and labour unions. Decision-makers in corporations and formal associations will make it their business to stay tuned into the political process and make sure that they have a say in its outcomes.

Jill Canuck of Ashburn Street, meanwhile, is excluded from these power centres and is, in any case, busy going to work at the Seven-Eleven and coming home, raising kids and spending time at the laundromat. She may simply not be able to find the time to concern herself with decisions that, in fact, have a great deal of influence on the future of her city, her neighbourhood and her family. Some of her interests may be represented by a grassroots group, such as a neighbourhood association, but that organization rarely if ever has the kind of access to the centres of power that corporations and formal organizations take for granted.

More typically, Ms. Canuck has no organizations speaking for her in the backrooms where coalitions are built. Her only hope of being represented may be a political party that stands for some of the things she wants from her government, and can be held accountable at the next election for delivering on its commitments. This best hope is an imperfect one, because parties, like everything else in this world, are less than perfect, but it is better than no hope at all.

When we view politics in this light, it becomes clear that municipal political parties that function openly and can be held accountable are capable of providing a benefit for ordinary people, while non-partisanship is in the interest of the holders of economic and organizational power. Small wonder that the idea of municipal non-partisanship originated with a business-dominated reform movement at about the turn of the last century and that the groups most vocally advocating partisanship in municipal politics have been labour, left-wing and left-liberal participants in city politics. But that is a story for another time.

Want to find out more? The analysis of coalition-building that I use is adapted from the regime literature. In that literature, a regime is a coalition that remains stable over a period of time and has achieved a dominant position. Among the best sources of this analysis are:

Clarence N. Stone and Heywood T. Sanders, eds. The politics of urban development. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1987. Especially chapters 1 and 14.

Clarence N. Stone. 2001. "Powerful Actors vs. Compelling Actions". Educational Policy 15 (1), January, 153-67.

Clarence N. Stone. 1989. Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-88. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press. Especially chapter 11.

An alternate view:

David Siegel. "City Hall Doesn’t Need Parties". Policy Options (June 1987), pp. 26-28.

Posted by leo-c at 7:20 PM

March 5, 2006

WHY SPRAWL IS A BIGGER PROBLEM WHEN GROWTH IS SLOW

A lot of genuine experts in problems of urban growth assume that urban sprawl is a big problem for cities that that are growing rapidly, but that it is much less of a problem with slow growth. This is only one of many illustrations of how the problems of slow-growth cities are neglected, because a little bit of reflection is all it takes to conclude that the opposite is true. In a nutshell, the problem of slow-growth cities is that, unlike the proverbial growth machine, they are a machine for the creation of empty space.

In the typical North American city, empty spaces appear in both suburban areas and the inner city. In the suburbs this happens because farms, forests or fields at the edge of the city are rarely developed in strict sequence, with the land nearest to existing urbanized tracts ahead of more distant ones in the development queue. A parcel of land separated from the rest of the city by greenfields will require roads, sewerage, water lines and transit service. These expensive services will have to be extended across lands that generate the low levels of taxation typical of farmland, rather than the much higher taxes that come from urban development. Once occupied, a new subdivision requires conveniently located community centres and library branches, and the same response times for fire fighters, police and paramedics that more densely-populated areas of the city enjoy. Street cleaning, snow removal, grass cutting, insect control, and everything else the municipality does will have to serve empty parcels of land as well as full ones.

Photo by Lynn Betts, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service http://photogallery.nrcs.usda.gov/

If a city is growing slowly, as Winnipeg is, those empty spaces can be there a long time before development fills them up. In a rapidly growing city, such as Vancouver, empty parcels are filled up more quickly. For example, Vancouver and surrounding municipalities, with 690 persons per square kilometre, has an easier time paying its bills than the Winnipeg area, with 162. Even if everyone in Winnipeg lived in expensive homes and everyone in Vancouver in modest bungalows – which is decidedly not the case – Winnipeg would have trouble keeping pace.

Someone will object that both the Winnipeg and Vancouver metropolitan areas – but especially metropolitan Winnipeg – include large areas belonging to urbanizing municipalities, where thinly scattered residences may require a much lower level of municipal services. However, a comparison of the cities of Vancouver and Winnipeg, excluding surrounding municipalities, produce much the same result: population densities, respectively, of 4759 and 1332. By either calculation, Winnipeg is forced to spread its services far more thinly than Vancouver.

To be sure, a gross calculation based only on population density skips many important details, but more detailed investigations have produced similar results. A variety of studies that, among them, have calculated the infrastructure costs associated with different densities and settlement patterns, as well as the differences between uniform and mixed-use developments, make it clear that the low-density, single-land-use development that is typical of North American suburbs and exurban areas carries a heavy price tag. Studies that go beyond infrastructure to calculate the costs of other services similarly demonstrate that higher densities and greater proximity of different types of development (houses, stores, offices) produce substantial savings compared with the isolated residential districts, shopping centres and industrial areas typical of North American suburban development.

What does all this have to do with slow and fast growth? By sheer force of numbers and distance, cities necessarily densify as they get larger, even if they are badly planned, and if they are growing rapidly, they densify more quickly. As a practical matter, that means that when leap-frog development takes place at the edge of metropolitan Vancouver, the empty spaces that represent a taxpayer liability get filled in quickly, while, in Winnipeg, they languish for a long time as empty spaces, and taxpayer liabilities. That is one way that North American urban development is a machine for the production of empty spaces.

The second empty space machine is the decay, followed possibly by abandonment, of many inner city neighbourhoods adjacent to the commercial heart of the city. In a city that is growing rapidly, development pressure tends to produce rapid gentrification or expansion of downtown towers. In slow-growth centres, the decay simply continues, and empty lots sprout, producing more untaxable land that must be serviced. In many cities decay simply overwhelms efforts at regeneration.

http://invinciblecities.camden.rutgers.edu/intro.html

Accordingly, in Vancouver’s poverty-stricken Downtown Eastside, gentrification and the encroachment of the financial district have been ongoing issues. In Winnipeg’s centrally-located North End and West End neighbourhoods, things aren't as bad as in the picture above, but community organizers are locked in a never-ending battle against the proliferation of boarded-up buildings and empty lots. They make the best of a bad situation by renovating houses and developing pocket parks, community gardens or new, affordable homes. But the empty lots continue to proliferate. Gentrification or office development is out of the question in much of that vast area. Downtown as in the suburbs, Winnipeg's taxpayers assume the burden of servicing empty spaces, and neighbourhoods with low property values, while Vancouver's decaying areas quickly fill up with premium-rate taxpayers.

This is only one of many ways that the politics and the problems of cities differ according to their rate of growth. Slow-growth cities and rapidly-growing ones need to be managed differently, but usually the decision-makers in slow-growth cities simply ape the policies being pursued by such cities as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Calgary and Dallas. Until they learn to manage their affairs according to their actual situation, instead of mindlessly adopting policies being pursued elsewhere, they will remain urban North America's poor cousins.

Want to find out more, and see additional documentation? Look for:

Christopher Leo and Katie Anderson, “Being Realistic about Urban Growth.” Journal of Urban Affairs. 28:2, 2006.

Christopher Leo and Wilson Brown, “Slow Growth and Urban Development Policy.” Journal of Urban Affairs. 22:2, 2000, 193-213.

Posted by leo-c at 4:11 PM

February 14, 2006

RAIDING THE RESERVE FUNDS

The City of Winnipeg has a series of reserve funds for investment in heritage properties, housing rehabilitiation, improvements to Assiniboine Park, perpetual care of city cemetaries, and much more. The purpose of these funds is to ensure that the city will be able to meet its obligations in the face of the inevitable fluctuations in budget allocations and costs.

In the 1980s it used to be an annual ritual for city council to balance the budget by raiding these funds. Mayors Susan Thompson and Glen Murray, who were the city's chief executives from 1992 until 2004, had the good sense to put a stop to that practice. Now the city is reviving it.

Our troubles began a long time before the 1980s, when the city set out on a policy of building roads, sewers and water systems across the bald prairie, far in excess of our actual needs, and far beyond what we could afford to maintain. (See "Why sprawl is a bigger problem when growth is slow") Ms Thompson and Mr Murray didn't put a stop to that, but at least they forced the city to face its budget problems, through an honest accounting of our assets and liabilities, instead of continuing the annual charade of covering current requirements by impairing our ability to meet our obligations in future.

Dipping into the reserve funds to put money into road maintenance and building, is, in practice, a raid on the public library system, the transit system, the golf courses, the city's computer system, the development of much-needed open space, and much more, in order to deal with our ruinous infrastructure deficit. I hope city council, if it cannot solve this problem, will at least opt not to sweep it under the rug, leaving our children and grandchildren to clean up the mess.

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