CITY SPARS OVER SPRAWL
Suburb growth restrained, not eliminated
To get a sense of why a home builder uttering the words “suburban development freeze” rankles city planners and some aldermen, pull out the Herald’s Homes section and open it to the sales map.
Buyers have their choice of starter or mid-price homes and townhouses in about two dozen new communities, and that’s without even venturing beyond city boundaries into bedroom communities. At least four communities in every quadrant. Want lake living? Something close to LRT? Ring road access? Ridgetop views? Close to the future Imperial Oil headquarters? A home address that shares its name with a western film? Check out Auburn Bay, Saddlestone, Kincora, Evansridge, Quarry Park and Silverado, respectively.
Legacy, Hotchkiss and Cityscape are among the next Calgary subdivisions springing up. Beyond that are the Keystone and Belvedere areas, which at full build-out will each be the size of four Chestermeres.
Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi touts new housing starts at pre-recession levels — in part to counter developers’ protests of the aforementioned suburban ‘freeze’ — although forecasts predict the pace will slow in 2013.
But beneath those boomlike figures lurks some hard numbers for city hall. It says it can’t keep up with the trend and the growth pattern, and is trying to change it.
Consider what happened in the new southeast development of Mahogany last autumn. It’s as dense and openly designed as the city wants modern suburbs to be, but it took a massive political effort just to get its 620-plus homeowners a single transit stop.
That was well past the 500-home threshold when subdivisions are supposed to get initial bus service, although not enough for fares to cover costs. But with so many neighbourhoods on the edges of the city all starting to surpass that threshold, the city couldn’t add buses to all of them. The population numbers may have worked, but the dollars didn’t.
“It was different when the city had a smaller border. But we’re spreading butter over too much bread,” said Ald. Druh Farrell, who chairs council’s planning policy committee.
Back are the cries on social media and elsewhere that city hall is “social engineering” with its push to add more condo and housing development in existing areas and less on the undeveloped fringes. Critics were equally vocal in 2009 during the debate over the new Plan It Calgary growth blueprint. Around the same time, the city was starting to hone its own economic argument on why shifting the growth pattern was increasingly necessary.
That message is front and centre again, albeit with a new spokesman.
“It’s not just about ... that you’ve got to have walkable communities. It’s about dollars,” Rollin Stanley, who has been Calgary’s planning general manager since June, said in a speech last month.
Although this message and much of the policy that supports it is a continuation of work that began before Stanley and Nenshi took office, the rhetoric — such as the developers’ comments Nenshi reacted sternly to — has more kick to it.
Nenshi and Stanley are much more blunt in speeches than their predecessors were, and are unafraid to poke at the status quo with edgy jokes. For example, in that same February speech to CivicCamp, a public advocacy group interested in planning, Stanley displayed maps of Calgary’s outward expansion and likened it to “the spreading stain of communism.” Later, he showed some video clips mocking car culture, but on the flip side he praised a low-rise apartment building in a suburb north of the airport, and another new project coming in that same far-flung area.
“I’ve never seen him be provocative to any single group or person,” said Peter Rishaug, a key figure in CivicCamp. “That’s not against a group. That’s just a certain form of development. He’s talking about the economics about a form of development, and he provided some figures there.”
Rishaug is the kind of guy who fits the Plan It mould — he lives in a Ramsay apartment because he likes to be able to walk or bike or bus to cultural events in the core, and only sometimes drives to the supermarket. But, he points out, his partner on Civic Camp’s financing municipal infrastructure committee lives in a house in Discovery Ridge in Calgary’s far west.
The old argument that suburban growth “doesn’t pay for itself ” has shifted since 2011, when the land levies that developers must pay doubled. Those levies cover most of the startup costs of making land development-ready, but doesn’t always pay for everything a community needs to function, or the future replacement costs that infrastructure will need, Stanley said.
“Sprawl may pay for itself when the pipes go into the ground, but it does not pay for itself 35 years from now. Just go ask Stockton, California,” he said, referring to the American city that declared bankruptcy last year amid bruising unemployment, property value free-fall and crippling debt.
Of those factors, debt is the worry Calgary can remotely say it shares. Borrowing for the west LRT, East Village redevelopment, Pine Creek wastewater treatment centre and other expansion projects will put the city at 80 per cent of its $6-billion legal debt ceiling. Council policy all but forbids debt beyond that mark, severely limiting its ability to borrow much more to put in basic infrastructure for new developments.
Enter the new plan called the “growth management framework,” which ends the city’s old way of growing — approving and servicing developers’ land in the order it came in.
Under the framework, the planning department will assess factors such as a new area’s startup servicing costs, consumer demand and proximity to jobs and transit lines, to develop priorities for limited development dollars.
“It’s not like grade school (where) everybody’s a winner. It actually is a ranking system,” Stanley said. “And it’s a logical ranking system that helps council decide where we should grow and how we should grow.”
Land sloping and proximity to existing pipes and sewer systems can mean the difference in millions of dollars for servicing costs, city planners say. Belvedere, one of those 60,000-person developments coming for council approval next month — before the growth framework is in place — has such challenges. It sits on the far east end of 17th Avenue S.E. and away from any other residential development.
“If you run Belvedere through the growth management framework process today, it would probably not come up overall as one of the priority areas ... because of these constraints,” said Matthias Tita, acting director of land-use policy and planning.
This new approach does mean some projects will be put on hold while others go ahead. The city doesn’t like to use the word “freeze” to describe this, but some industry players will certainly have to wait their turn. City officials say this approach pro- vides certainty to developers who will know their spot in the development queue, but they understand the anxiety in the industry.
“The issue comes when some landowners aren’t serviced and want to be,” said Chris Jacyk, leader of the growth management framework.
Ald. Farrell added: “No wonder they’re feeling uncertainty. They’re used to deciding where and when they grow — and then we came along with the chequebook.”
Mayor Nenshi said he’s not overly concerned about losing residential growth to outlying towns.
After all, Calgary has had three-quarters of the region’s housing starts in the past few years and has both Keystone (approved in the north end) and Belvedere in the works. Both will ultimately have populations larger than Airdrie.
City land already planned or with plans in progress has capacity for 407,000 new people, according to city information.
Of Calgary’s population growth in the next five years, 111,500 or 94 per cent is projected to go into new suburbs. The rest will go into existing areas — condos and homes. That’s actually less than last decade when established communities lost more population than gained, thanks to emptynesting in existing suburbs.
The city wants growth to be split equally between new and existing communities, but that’s a 2076 target.
“This really isn’t about forcing young families to move into condos downtown,” Nenshi said. “Some may choose to do so, but it’s really about providing different options for people throughout their life segments.”
Four years after the major Plan It debates, however, the city’s steps toward its goal — and its harder economic reality — are making those targets and their effects less abstract.
“I think that’s what is getting people a little bit nervous. While the development industry has supported Plan It Calgary, now that it’s real, they’re starting to get nervous.”