The more some neighbourhoods cost HRM to maintain, the less tax revenue those same communities are generating.
So says a new analysis of the correlation between road length and density in cities across the country that found some dense urban communities in Halifax are subsidizing their affluent suburban neighbours.
Urban planners Tristan Cleveland and Paul Dec crunched the numbers over the past year in partnership with Our HRM Alliance. The duo presented their findings last week at the national Building Resilience conference in Calgary, and Thursday afternoon at Dalhousie’s school of architecture.
Comparing census areas by subtracting road maintenance costs from total property tax revenue, the resulting figures show several neighbourhoods in Halifax aren’t carrying their fiscal weight.
Many of HRM’s poorest communities are perversely subsidizing high-income neighbourhoods on the fringes, say the researchers.
Glen Arbour, for instance, contributes $370,000 in tax revenue, after subtracting road costs. But Fairview brings in over five times that revenue—$2.1 million—despite an average household income half that of Glen Arbour.
“The more a place costs taxpayers, the less it’s chipping in to cover its own costs,” says Cleveland. “It’s just a totally insane financial strategy for the city to be investing in new communities that should be making us wealthy and are instead burdening everyone with more infrastructure.”
An increase in road lengths predictably drives up service costs like road maintenance and snow removal. But Cleveland says he was surprised to find those costs increase exponentially as density drops.
“We can’t be developing like that anymore. It just costs the city too much.”
Over the last 20 years, the total road length per resident in urban and suburban HRM has increased by five percent. Essentially, the city is “going the wrong way,” says Cleveland, if it ever wants to effectively manage property taxes.
“If we don’t make new communities more efficient than our older suburbs and communities in the core, we’ll continue to subsidize the new ones.”
Based on the findings, Our HRM Alliance is calling on the city to decrease Halifax’s average road length per resident from its current seven metres to six, hold any new developments to a maximum of 7.5 meters per residents and look into reforming property taxes to reduce “cross-subsidization” of neighbourhoods.
“This shows why the upcoming Green Network Plan is so important,” Our HRM Alliance coordinator Jenny Lugar says via press release. “We need to direct growth to existing communities. We’ve grown enough on the outer fringe and clearly need to start filling in blank spots on the roads we already have.”
The data analysis also found road length to be a strong indicator when planning active transportation. In neighbourhoods with more than seven metres of road between residents, almost no one walked, biked or took a bus.
Cleveland says more in-depth research will be done locally and with cities across the country to further analyze the findings. The results were also presented on Thursday afternoon to city hall’s planning team.
“The hope here is this will clarify the conversation,” he says. “It’s in the interest of all residents to shoot for reducing the amount of road we have per resident.”
A short presentation on the research and its findings can be found here.
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This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2017.
Thats certainly an example of severe imbalance that demonstrates a potential need for a correction with Glen Arbour in particular. The scary part of that mentality for me is that using only those metrics presented, none of rural NS should exist and the entire population should be concentrated in major cities. Carried to its extreme we should all move to NY or LA and abandon the “wilderness of NS”. I live in a sparsely populated area, and our area does benefit the whole with NIMBY services like a wind farm (largest in NS), the most advanced waste recycling landfill in eastern canada, food security promoting agriculture, tourism, and a lot more. We possibly cost the province more than we pay in tax individually, but the indirect benefit is not insignificant. The further away the community is from a city, the more of a bridge it becomes for surrounding rural communities, and that is certainly true for Glen Arbour as opposed to Fairview.
I don’t think the intention is to suggest rural areas shouldn’t exist and we should force everyone to live in urban areas. The intention is to make people more mindful of sprawl and its costs and find better ways to design communities so that the costs of providing services are more transparent. I’d hardly call Glen Arbour rural, and there’s no reason city dwellers should be subsidizing the infrastructure and maintenance costs of the wealthy individuals who live there. That’s much different than saying the whole of NS shouldn’t support rural communities.
If sprawl were properly priced then it would be cheaper to live in the city for those who wanted to and if you wanted to move to the suburbs you’re free to as long as you pay your share of the costs to build and maintain the infrastructure you use on a daily basis.
I would love to move into the city and not be such a suburban leach but I am afraid of being swarmed and stabbed while I’m out for my evening walk.
There is a saying in scientific analysis…torture the data until it tells you what you want it to tell you. I wish that were true in this case – unfortunately the truth is that using such rudamentry analysis negates the complexities of the issue and propagates a them versus us mentality.
We talk a lot about planning in this city. Planning assumes a coordinated effort trying to predict future needs (which is incredibly difficult) and create solution for those needs with a process to get there. We defenitly have processes in this city, there seems to be a new solution as yet another construction project begins BUT as I having been hearing lately from people trying to navigate the streets these days “who would have planned all of this at once?!?”.
Sometimes timing is out of our control for a variety of reasons however sometimes we don’t even use the information available:
Following up from my previous post..
The author of the report has frequently written of the benefits of densification but negates the realities of a municipality the size of PEI. The harsh criticism of the proposed Bayer’s Lake Medical centre is another good example. Saying you will not be able to get to the location easily by bike or bus misses ignores the reality of the institution. The QEII is the tertiary care facility for Nova Scotia and in some cases the Maritimes – patients there are not arriving or leaving by bike. I would suggest an even bolder approach. Tear down the existing facility, sell most of the property, and use the proceeds to build a Medical Campus outside of the city’s core more accessible to All who need it. A smaller facility can be built on the remaining property on the peninsula to serve the needs of the core.
Amalgamation has been a difficult marriage. Most people in my area (Hammonds Plains) who read the article commented we did not want to join the city in the first place…but it is difficult to unscramble that egg. The author`s research will probably get him published but is not helpful in the creation of good public policy.