Quote:
Originally Posted by Biff
The City really needs to get the carrot and the stick going for Graham and South Main.
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What would you suggest? The city already grants TIFs for almost anything new downtown, but it turns out when you have low property taxes, shaving a couple hundred thousand off annual operating costs for high rise residential doesn't move the pro-forma needle as much as people think it would in the face of high construction and land costs.
Personally I've thought maybe the city should build a large, centralized parkade for nearby developers to piggy back on since it's my understanding one of the biggest financial barriers to downtown residential is the cost of digging down to build parking. If the city could alleviate the burden of below-grade parking by providing a centralized facility that nearby towers could benefit from, I wonder if that changes the math for anyone.
Of course, building a municipal parking facility would likely be an unpopular political move since "Winnipeg needs to be less car centric, not more car centric", but the reality is people don't want to pay market rents to live downtown for a variety of factors, so we need below market rents to get people to live there. But developers won't build at below market rents because math doesn't math, in particular due to land and construction. So if the city could break the cycle by taking on parking and eliminating below-grade construction costs, we could get some more residential, which leads to safer, more vibrant environment, which eventually leads to more residential - without subsidy from the public treasury.
I feel like TIFs alone only help on the margin.
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