In our last blog post we looked at the bargain that citizens strike with the places where they live. We determined that citizens want to live where they can experience a good “quality of life”. Cities attract residents and their tax contributions, by providing the framework and services that support the better lives that people desire. It’s an ongoing negotiation between cities and their citizens, with responsible civic engagement from both sides at its core.
In this blog we’ll look at what happens when a city goes off-course, and the bargain becomes increasingly difficult to honour. Such a case is close at hand, with Manitoba’s capital, Winnipeg facing severe deficits while unfunded maintenance for infrastructure has ballooned.
At the end of 2023, Winnipeg’s net financial position (NFP), which is the sum of the financial assets it holds minus all the money it owes, was a whopping negative $1.2 billion. At the same time, it had a tally of over $3.0 billion of vital infrastructure work that was unfunded. Cities can’t go bankrupt in the classic sense of a business shutting down and the owners walking away. When a city can’t pay their bills, they have four main coping mechanisms:
- Reduce services and abandon infrastructure
- Increase borrowing and beg for larger provincial grants
- Pull money from long term capital reserves to pay for current operations
- Increase property taxes, user fees and fines.
Winnipeg has done all four and has pumped their borrowing and reserve transfers as far as legally allowed. It is sobering to reflect on how each of these tactics damages the bargain between residents and their city.
We could take a few paragraphs here to agonize over the rotten choices left to a city whose finances have gone off the rails. Instead, let’s step back and look at the biggest single driver behind Winnipeg’s crisis. In going to the source of the illness, we may also find its cure.
About sixty years ago, Winnipeg began its suburban experiment. The hypothesis was that turning farm fields into malls and low-density suburbs would be profitable for developers, and a source of new tax wealth for Winnipeg. Half of the experiment went fine – developers did extremely well, and at first blush it seemed the city coffers were filling too. But here’s the flaw: every suburb has roads, sidewalks, sewer and water lines and when you reduce population density by a factor of 3 you effectively increase maintenance costs by a multiplier of 3. Simply, you get way more stuff to maintain, and fewer taxpayers to pay the bills. But with a timeline of 20-25 years on things like road re-surfacing and 50 years on sewer and water line renewal, the worst consequences of sprawl decisions don’t land until long after the decision-makers are out of office or retired.
The suburban experiment also had several co-morbidities that may have been hard to foresee in the 1960’s, but that have become painfully obvious since:
- With far-flung suburbs, the distances to civic amenities in the old city were unmanageable, new suburban ones were needed, thus incurring building and operating costs for new community centers, schools, parks, firehalls, and pools. Meanwhile as people migrated outward, the city’s core amenities were underused, creating further inefficiencies and a hollowing out of the most fiscally productive downtown neighbourhoods.
- Housing in the suburbs featured a monocrop of single-family homes on large lots. The rich mixing, variety, and density of mercantile, residential and commercial uses in the old neighbourhoods was banned in new zoning for the suburbs. Walking to the corner store, café, or hardware shop was replaced by car trips to large shopping centers with massive parking lots, further exacerbating the effects of sprawl.
- Adding hundreds of kilometers of new roads, to connect where we live to where we worked, shopped, studied, played and worshiped spurred new urban terms – like traffic jam, gridlock, and road rage. Thousands of new cars competed for space on the roadways. The growth in car ownership continues unabated, with some 7,000 vehicles added to Winnipeg’s roads every year, only increasing pressure on city leaders to build more roads that no one can afford.
- Parking has become an economic millstone around the necks of cities, residents, landlords, and merchants. Donald Shoup’s book, “The High Cost of Free Parking” is a masterwork that details the many ways that a suburban, car-reliant society is robbing itself of the very things that make cities vibrant and liveable.
- Many authors have filled books with stories, studies and analyses of how sprawl has torn the social fabric of communities, making people lonelier, sicker, and less able to participate in community life. Read Charles Montgomery’s book “Happy City” for an ultimately hopeful discussion of this topic.
We need to wake up and admit that we’re junkies, addicted to growth and a development model that is harming us. For citizens of Winnipeg, that’s an admission that could lead to healing. Because we all deeply believed in the suburban fantasy, the city saving medicine will seem distasteful, even harsh. But you don’t break a 50-year habit by sidestepping reality. You acknowledge your crisis, and then you take action to re-shape your future:
ACTION ONE: “Stop digging the hole from which you want to escape”
Drop the curtain on developing farm fields into low-density suburbs. Developers will try everything to block this action, because greenfield development requires little creativity, poses less risk and is a genuine gold mine. Realize: just like you, they’re junkies too.
ACTION TWO: “Focus on solutions that have worked for centuries”
Prioritize urban infill and renewal by zoning for density. Grant property owners the right to build up to a four-plex on any city lot larger than _____m2. Reduce red tape and public hearings for up to 3 storey multi-family buildings and replace them with design and process standards that minimize conflicts with neighbours.
ACTION THREE: “Reduce reliance on the thing that made you sick”
Invest in active transportation and public transit while placing a moratorium on expanding or adding road infrastructure. Remove parking mandates. As funds become available, prioritize building out the alternatives and improving road maintenance.
In Steinbach, it’s time to pump the brakes and reflect on the fork in the road we passed several years ago. Turning around now is the quickest way to safety and a secure future. Proceeding down the ‘broad way’ we’re on, annexing lands for expansion, allowing strip development to go further and further out, rubber stamping greenfield developments, fanning NIMBY sentiments, is the way well traveled by cities now in deep financial trouble. Do we really want to emulate them? Or do we tap into our heritage of non-conformity, our love of creative solutions, and our steely self-discipline?
Steinbach could provide an example of how to get development right. It won’t be easy, but however hard it might be, it will always be a happy task compared to the work facing our friends in Winnipeg.
I pray we find the boldness to take a different path.