Originally Posted by Winnipegger
I think City Hall is going to continue to spin its wheels on infill strategy because no one actually knows the true difference in cost between adding X units of infill to the city versus adding X units of greenfield development to the city.
In general, developers pay for all the upfront hard infrastructure costs on greenfield development. So if a developer is building another Sage Creek or Waverley West, the developer puts in the local streets, water, sewer, parks, retention ponds, and sidewalks. On the other hand, with infill, a lot of mature neighborhoods in Winnipeg have really old water and sewer systems that need to be replaced to accommodate any sort of growth, and this cost is typically unknown until the project is close to beginning and is usually borne by the City itself.
Where the math starts getting fuzzy is that we know greenfield development (aka sprawl) requires further capital investment in regional roads, new fire stations, new police stations, new community centres, and new bus routes, all of which the City is having a very difficult time to produce right now (I hear fire response times in Waverley West are near 11 minutes, the standard for the City is 4 minutes or so). The City will also have to pay incrementally out of it's operating budget for additional police, fire, and community service staff to service the new neighborhood, along with eventually being responsible for long-term maintenance and snow clearing of the new local streets. Further, it is a fact that people in greenfield will use roads more, and have longer commutes, adding additional wear and tear to City roads. These are all major costs associated with greenfield, but are hard to calculate and when you do calculate them, are very sensitive to assumptions.
With infill, it is assumed that the majority of capital costs associated with greenfield aren't required. Presumably the mature neighborhood is already adequately covered by a police station, fire station, community center, library, etc. So tearing down an old house in St. Boniface or Wolesley to build a 20 unit condo shouldn't add stress to local services. But the truth is that it does add stress, just in other ways. Sure, you don't need to build a new police station, but you might need to expand the capacity of the local library or park, which costs money too. And if people living in mature neighborhoods are more likely to use "active" or public transit, then there may be additional capital costs for adding in bike lanes, expanded path systems, or even additional buses and bus routes (and let's be clear: buses do more damage to the roads than the equivalent amount of cars needed to transport the same amount of people).
So when we try to objectively look at all the hard costs, both in capital and operating, associated with infill versus greenfield, it's really not clear which one is better for a city facing severe fiscal constraints. On the one hand, initial infrastructure costs in suburbs are zero for the city which means expanding the tax base (albeit only marginally) at virtually no cost in the short run, while on the other hand infill might be more "sustainable" in the long run, but requires city capital investment almost immediately due to aging water and sewer systems.
Mayes isn't necessarily wrong, and urbanists who immediately decry his stance simply because it's more intricate than an "infill good, suburbs bad" opinion are failing to take in the big picture. Does sprawl cost money? Absolutely. But so does infill, and doing the math on it isn't easy and is subject to interpretation. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to encourage infill, we absolutely should. But we have to bear in mind the challenges associated with both types of development and try to find solutions to overcoming the financial challenges Winnipeg faces. In a city that is struggling to provide an adequate level of public goods and services to all citizens, politicians are going to think about what gets them the best bang for their buck in the short term. Long term thinking isn't useful when you're just struggling to survive until the next budget cycle.
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