Development
York Region Debt Part Deux
January 24, 2012 | 
Author Due to York Region’s confusing governing structure, many people I talk to are only vaguely aware of York’s Regional Council — an overarching body that actually collects and spends the majority of all taxes and fees collected within the Region. York Region already runs one of the highest per-capita debt loads in North America and for a number of years, the Region has been backing this debt with the promise of “future development charges”. As a region we are betting that our future will pay for both the present and the future. As stated in the York Region 2011 Capital Budget:
Due to significant population and employment growth experienced in the last several years, York Region’s long term capital program, in particular, the road, water and sewer infrastructure plans, have been accelerated to accommodate the higher demands. As a result, there has been a significant increase in the amount of new debt required. However, the majority of this debt will be recovered from future development charge revenues. To support its capital plan, the Region will need to issue approximately $847 million of new debt in 2011 and a further $640 million in 2012. Over the 10 year forecast period of the capital plan, it is estimated the Region will need to issue, in total, about $4.87 billion of new debt. This amount does not include an estimated $360 million of debt which will be refinanced in 2019 and 2020 and which has already been approved by Council.
Based on the promise of future growth, the Region is borrowing $847 million in new debt in 2011 and expects to grow that to $4.87-billion by 2021. We are also told that Development Charges will pay for the “majority of this debt”. Is that possible? Based on the numbers published by York Region, I don’t see how.
In 2009, York Region issued permits for 7105 housing starts. At that time, the Region charged a $23,743 development fee for each single-family dwelling. Since then, the Region has increased development charges to 32,000 per single-family dwelling.
Less is charged for semi-detached and apartment units, but for simplicity, let’s use $32,000 per unit. How many units must we build to pay for the 4.87-billion capital infrastructure:
$4.87 billion / $32,000 = 152,187 housing units
The number of actual housing starts in York Region was dropping in 2008 and 2009. (I have not found stats for 2010 or 2011. Anyone?) However, in order to pay for this $4.87-billion debt, the Region will need to collect developer charges for more than 15,000 housing units each and every year for the next 10 years — almost a twofold increase since 2009. Is this even possible? And, in a precarious world with dwindling fossil fuels, is it desirable?
In fact, the Region’s own 10-year capital budget shows that Development Charges will actually only finance 18% of the total infrastructure costs.
In other words, most of the cost of growth will be borne by taxpayers through:
- Grants & Subsidies (paid by taxpayers to the Province)
- User Rates (paid by taxpayers)
- Tax Levy (paid by taxpayers)
- Reserves (paid by taxpayers)
- Debentures (risk assumed by taxpayers. Who pays interest?)
It’s true that some of these costs will be paid by people who choose to live in these new developments, but much of this money — and interest on the debt — will likely be shared by all of us. As the saying goes: privatize the profit, socialize the debt.
It’s time for York Region and its municipalities to come clean about how we are subsidizing rapid development with unsustainable debt.
Innisfil residents to become next victims of “Places to Grow” act
The McGuinty legacy of “managing” growth, by foisting it on unsuspecting towns and residents across southern Ontario continues. On Monday, January 10th, Innisfil residents are invited to a public open house at the Town Hall from 4 to 8 p.m. Places to Grow is supposed to help curtail sprawl by mandating that 40% of new development occur within exisitng urban boundaries. Although 40% is a cowardly target, it would not be so bad except that “plan” has become nothing but a fastracking process to jump start rapid development all across the Golden Horseshoe (which has rapidly turned into the SmartCentre Horseshoe). So here we grow again with the same kind of tactics used in Markham, Richmond Hill, Vaughan, etc:
- The town wants public input before it makes a case to the province about a new growth plan
- The town is under a tight deadline — Jan. 31 — to make its submission to the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe (2006) affecting the Simcoe Sub-Area.
- The town wants to commit to just 23% intensification rate instead of 40%. In other words, watch out for thousands of acres of farmland to be scraped down to the clay and turned into subdivisions and shopping centres.
Once the “plan” has been agreed upon through this oh-so- friendly consultation process, residents can look forward to rapid approval of new development projects. And, if York Region is anything to go by, watch for Simcoe to begin borrowing large amounts of money to build the infrastructure needed to support this artificially inseminated building boom.
The end result will be more generic sprawl, further replication of the usual super stores and franchises. And Ontario will have tied up billions more in energy sapping infrastructure that it can barely afford to maintain.
Here’s a silly thought: design policy that encourages slower physical growth, combined with wide and deep intellectual and creative growth (invest in education). Design policy that encourages each generation to continously produce healthy, highly educated replacement generations (invest in health). Design policy that ensures that the current generation can’t arbitrarily deplete resources that belong to the future. Then, within this framework, let’s see how much physical growth is possible and desirable.
Never gonna happen, but I can dream, can’t I?
T.O. in 2050
The Toronto Star’s Catherine Porter has written a lovely catalogue of the global warming horrors that await Toronto and the GTA in the coming decades: drought, flash floods, algal blooms, power shortages, water shortages, mosquito-borne disease… you get the idea. My only quibble is that nowhere does Porter acknowledge that all of these problems will be exacerbated by population growth and development. Prosperity in Ontario is fueled by population growth and that population is rapidly pushing east, west and north around the Golden Horseshoe. The Ontario government has decreed that four million additional souls will feed off this land over the next 25 years. God knows how many of us will be sustained in 2050.
This growth will come largely because of federal immigration policy which is slated to admit some 300,000 immigrants per year. As a Queen’s University study notes “Immigration has become the central dynamic in both population and labour force growth in Canada.” The authors of this study explain that in the late 1980′s Canadian immigration policy moved away from setting immigration levels to match short-run economic conditions. Instead, our government now takes an optimistically long view of things and ignores current unemployment and economic performance when setting immigration targets. I would add that the feds also ignore environmental factors and the carrying capacity of the land when setting these levels.
Instead, the problem of where to house those extra four million bodies has been downloaded to Ontario. And Ontario, with dubious wisdom, has cranked out the “Places to Grow” plan. This “plan” is really more like a menu that details how the southern half of this province will be carved up and served to developers. I ranted over the folly of this plan a while back, and groups such as the Neptis Foundation have found their own faults with it. They point out that Ontario’s Places to Grow plan:
- Does not contain measures that would result in the better, more productive development of currently unbuilt areas within urban boundaries, nor in significantly increased re-urbanization of the built-up areas of the region.
- Does not provide strong protection for environmentally sensitive lands not associated with the Greenbelt. Much stronger policies are needed in a growth management plan.
- Does not protect agricultural land across the whole region. The proposed policies retain the standards currently in force, which have failed to protect farmland.
- May not decrease automobile use and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the plan’s support for transit, complementary measures to reduce automobile dependence are not included.
- Contains few specifics on how success will be tracked and measured.
Even the Neptis critique, while it makes valid points, never questions the fundamental assumption that Ontario’s population needs to grow significantly beyond current levels. Of course, the issue of immigration — since the majority of Canadians are immigrants or the children of immigrants — is a touchy one. But it is an issue that must be addressed if we are to make real progress in reducing our environmental footprint in order to ensure long-term survival and a decent life for our children.
Posted in Development, Environment, Toronto | 
Tags: Neptis, Ontario Places to Grow | 
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Stormwater Retention Pond Blues
If you happen to live in an urban area, you probably walk, cycle or drive by a stormwater retention pond almost every day. If you are not sure, just look for a medium-sized, murky body of water surrounded by a few acres of grass and geese (and the requisite industrial arrangement of precast stone, shrubs and riverrock). That’d be the one. Your local retention pond may smell like something leaking from the bottom of a supermarket dumpster, but it plays an important role, catching run-off from roads, parking lots and over-fertilized lawns, and filtering it so that less bad stuff finds its way downstream into rivers and lakes. From the civil engineer’s perspective, these ponds are utilitarian machines, but to the real estate developer they can be a powerful marketing device. "Live with Nature", the developers tell us, and "Ravine Lots Available". Where I live, such signs usually denote nothing more than the fact that a creek or drainage ditch will be allowed to flow behind a row of houses, connecting one storm retention pond to another.
It seems to me that this kind of "life with nature" contributes to an urban idea of the nature world that is simplified, artificially controlled and patently false. It is also sometimes dangerous. Last weekend, two young boys decided to walk across a stormwater retention pond that had partially iced over. After testing the thickness with small stones, they began to cross over. One fell in and the other drowned trying to save him. Was this tragedy caused by a mistaken faith in their own youthful immortality? Or, have we merely created an over-developed urban landscape that makes it impossible for people to viscerally experience the beauty — and the danger — of a truly natural world?
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To further confuse the issue is the fact that stormwater retention ponds actually provide poor habitat for fish and birds. But beggars can’t be be choosers, so some species try to make a go of it regardless of the water quality. According to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment’s manual Stormwater Management Practices (OMOE, 1994), "stormwater ponds should be considered treatment facilities and not a replacement for natural wetlands", but this is exactly what they have become. Today we went out for the Audubon Christmas Bird Count and found northern and shrike great blue herons, along with the usual suspects, at local retention ponds. We are supposed to enjoy looking at these ponds, but god help you if you fish or swim or otherwise "use" one of them. After last week’s drowning, the president of the development made this clear in an interview with the Toronto Star:
"This is a very vital pond," said Madden, president of Diral Development Corp. Unfortunately, the increasingly complex array of municipal, provincial and federal approvals required for stormwater retention ponds is forcing developers to landscape these areas to look like parks, he said. "It’s not a lake. It’s not for recreational use. So don’t entice people to go there," he said in an interview today. "Don’t put walkways around it. Don’t landscape it like it’s part of the parks system. Landscape them with tall grasses to keep people away."
In other words, buy into the "live with nature" marketing dream, but once you move in, just look at "nature" from a safe distance — don’t come near it. Am I mad to think that this way of living is madness? Am I crazy to question Ontario’s "Places to Grow Plan", which anticipates the population of the GTA will double within 25 years? Am I wrong to think that we have essentially reached the carrying capacity of our own environment? We’re full up folks, although there appears to be plenty of physical space in which to put people. This is all the more worrisome when you consider the millions of environmental refugees that are expected to flood into developed countries in the coming decades. By trying to become the lifeboat of the world, will we all drown?