Quote:
Originally Posted by counterfactual
But the reality is often something different-- it's just conservative locals who hate the possibility of new-- probably young-- people coming to the community.
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Fundamentally I think the goal should be to balance the costs and benefits to everybody. On the one hand, we want a good city, and on the other we also need to respect the rights and reasonable expectations of a bunch of different parties.
The problem with these consultations is that they end up being co-opted by small groups of people (150 is considered a lot, but it is likely fewer than the number that would move into these buildings) with narrow interests that may not be aligned with the city as a whole. For example, the homeowners have a financial interest in bringing up property values, and restricting the supply of new housing in their neighbourhood is a great way of doing this.
There's a power imbalance when holding council votes on a case-by-case basis because the well-to-do homeowners are the only ones who can show up and lobby councillors. If you need affordable housing, you may not even know where you'll end up living and you don't have the means to attend meetings or launch NSUARB appeals for hypothetical buildings all over the city (and you wouldn't have standing for the NSUARB anyway). You might be able to attend something like HRM by Design, but in the neighbourhood consultations a lot of voices are not heard, even though some people like to suggest we should just add up the yeas and nays as if we were talking about a public vote.
And of course there's the enormous problem that nobody knows what the result of the popularity contest will be until it's resolved. Can the developer built a 40 storey building? 20? 5? Answering that question takes months or years and costs a lot of money.
Some residents might have good things to say and some councillors might do a good job of counter-balancing the one-sidedness of the situation but it is still a bad system. The municipality would be well-served by continuing to move away from this model.
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