December 2024 - AT-Network - University of Manitoba Mailing Lists

WFP: Higher density key to fixing budget woes (Dec9'24)
by Beth McKechnie 09 Dec '24

09 Dec '24

Caution! This message was sent from outside the University of Manitoba. Only way to become more economically viable is to allow city to grow inwards and upwards Higher density key to fixing budget woes https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2024/12/09/higher-density-ke… ALARM bells have been ringing at Winnipeg City Hall ahead of Wednesday’s 2025 budget update. It might be the annual doom and gloom dance, done to lower expectations before every budget announcement, but with the city’s rainy-day fund being emptied and a significant deficit projected, it does feel like this time the warnings are real. Like many before him, Mayor Scott Gillingham has responded by being vocal about the need for the province to come to the table with new funding sources for the city. Two polls — one conducted for the mayor’s office, and one for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities — were recently released in support of this campaign. The surveys identified that Winnipeggers believe the top priority for civic spending should be repairing infrastructure, with 81 per cent indicating road quality as the top civic issue impacting quality of life. A majority also believe the city needs additional municipal funding, with strong support shown for increased provincial transfers. The only immediate solution appears to be more tax dollars, either civic or provincial, but asking taxpayers to take more money from their pockets is a Band-Aid that avoids addressing the core issue that got us here. Winnipeg, like most Canadian cities, has been on an economic slippery slope for a long time. That slope is called suburban sprawl. It makes many people defensive to hear it, but our crippling infrastructure deficit and annual budget crunch at city hall can be directly linked to the city’s financially unsustainable, low-density growth patterns over the last 50 years. The concept is simple. Lower density means fewer people are paying for more things. Ten people living on a street have their taxes divided by 10 to maintain the road. If only five people live on that same street, each taxpayer is responsible for twice as much. On a macro scale, this is how Winnipeg got to where it is. Our city has been growing three times faster in area than in population, meaning overall density has been dropping as it grows. In 2019, the city compared the built-up area of Winnipeg over 50 years and found that the footprint of the city had increased by 96 per cent, almost doubling, while the population increased by only 37 per cent. If Winnipeg had simply maintained the density it had in the 1970s, the city’s footprint, and its corresponding infrastructure would be 30 per cent smaller than it is today. This would have gone a long way to balancing our civic budgets. From the founding of Winnipeg until the late 1960s, the city grew simply by extending the existing street grid. Ride your bike from Wellington Crescent to Taylor Avenue on any street in River Heights and you will see a different decade of houses every two blocks. As the city grew, the streets just got longer. After this time, we started building isolated subdivisions with long stretches of infrastructure connecting them back to the older neighbourhoods. This development pattern wildly increased the city’s overall footprint and reduced its density. Every Winnipeg taxpayer is today responsible for maintaining 10 per cent more roads than they were in 2010. Fewer people paying for more things. Greater distances between neighbourhoods meant that existing civic amenities like schools, libraries and community centres, could no longer be shared with new growth, requiring new ones to be built. This issue was compounded by opposition to higher density, new development in existing neighbourhoods that meant, as household sizes naturally decreased, neighbourhood populations fell. Most of Winnipeg’s mature neighbourhoods have 20 to 30 per cent fewer people living in them today than 50 years ago. This resulted in existing civic amenities being underused, while at the same time we were building new ones in outer suburbs. Again, fewer people paying for more things. The types of neighbourhoods we started building also impacted the city’s economic viability. With apartment buildings, townhouses and single-family homes mixed on every street, the higher density of mature neighbourhoods makes them far more productive at generating tax revenue than newer single-family subdivisions. Per square foot of land, the assessed tax value of neighbourhoods like Wolseley, West Broadway, and Osborne Village, is twice that of Island Lakes or Whyte Ridge. The impacts of sprawl are not limited to where we live but also includes where we shop. Older neighbourhoods were centred along commercial streets and former streetcar lines, fronted with shops that people could walk to from their home. That pattern has been replaced with big box stores and oceans of asphalt parking that push the footprint of the city outward. This retail development pattern is a similarly unproductive tax base. The handful of small buildings and shops on a single block of Corydon Avenue has a collective assessed tax value that is equal to a Costco in south Winnipeg that consumes five times more land area. Longer travel distances in the expanding city has created a greater reliance on private vehicles. Car ownership per capita has increased by 20 per cent in only 20 years, and the number of vehicles on Winnipeg’s roads increases by about 7,500 every year. This results in more parking lots and bigger roads that push the city even further out in a never-ending cycle of economically unsustainable sprawl. The solution to the perennial budget woes at city hall requires that we take a step back and re-evaluate our city-building choices. The city is growing quickly, and the only way to become economically viable in the long term is for each of us to welcome more neighbours into our communities, allowing our city to grow inwards and upwards, instead of outwards. More people paying for fewer things. Brent Bellamy is creative director at Number Ten Architectural Group.

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CBC: Wellington Crescent speed-reduction motion loses momentum after committee vote (Dec5'24)
by Beth McKechnie 06 Dec '24

06 Dec '24

Caution! This message was sent from outside the University of Manitoba. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/wellington-crescent-speed-reduction…

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WFP: Mayor’s cabinet puts brakes on reduced speed on Wellington Crescent (Dec6'24)
by Beth McKechnie 06 Dec '24

06 Dec '24

Caution! This message was sent from outside the University of Manitoba. Mayor’s cabinet puts brakes on reduced speed on Wellington Crescent https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2024/12/05/mayors-cabinet-pu… The mayor’s cabinet has rejected the call to slash the speed limit on Wellington Crescent. The executive policy committee cast a three-two vote against reducing the speed limit to 30 km/h from 50 km/h on Wellington, from River Avenue to the western end of Academy Road. A final council vote is still required. While more than 50 delegates spoke to support the change, EPC members were told it drew ample backlash in at least one ward. “When they called my office, I got mostly people in opposition,” said Coun. John Orlikow (River Heights-Fort Garry). Orlikow said some residents fear reducing the speed limit could divert more drivers onto Kingsway, increasing traffic around some schools. He said elected officials shouldn’t impose the change without having city traffic experts study it first. “Arbitrarily deciding (to reduce the speed) without a report, that’s breaking the trust I have with the neighbourhood. I told them I wouldn’t do that… We have to think not just of Wellington Crescent (and) not just of cyclists,” said Orlikow. An expedited speed limit reduction could have unintended consequences and fuel opposition to reduced speed limits in general, he said. “It’s going to be very hard to educate people if we decide… we don’t care what you want and think,” said Orlikow. Derek Rolstone, the only unelected delegate who spoke against the change at the EPC meeting, said reducing Wellington’s speed would divert traffic to several nearby residential streets. Rolstone urged councillors to study the change in much more depth. “This is a ridiculous, knee-jerk reaction to a terrible crime,” he said. Several delegates linked their support for the speed reduction to the death of cyclist Rob Jenner, who was killed June 6 when he was hit by a vehicle on Wellington Crescent that was driving 159 km/h. Beckham Severeight, 19, pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing death. Rolstone said a lower speed limit couldn’t have prevented that tragedy or others like it. After a lengthy discussion, EPC split the motion into parts and narrowly rejected the speed limit reduction, with Mayor Scott Gillingham joining councillors Vivian Santos and Evan Duncan to oppose the change and councillors Sherri Rollins and Janice Lukes voting to support it. Coun. Jeff Browaty was away on city business and absent from the vote. The mayor said he was not prepared to support the speed reduction without further study over concerns that could have a domino effect on other routes. “If we drop the speed to 30 (km/h), we don’t know the impact of that on (other) residential streets in the neighbourhood. Would it push traffic off of Wellington into residential streets? What impact would it have on our transit system? …It’s time to analyse that and (have) our road safety team take a look at the impact,” said Gillingham, in an interview Thursday. The mayor said he’s heard mixed reaction to the idea and personally believes a separated bike lane would be the most effective option to make the route safer. Santos said she supports reduced speed limits on residential streets but believes council should wait for the outcome of current pilot projects that are testing the change before taking further action. “To do one-offs, it irks me a little because it kind of starts to (favour) one area,” she said. On Thursday, Lukes stressed the vote included steps to make Wellington Crescent safer. EPC unanimously voted to direct staff to report on an interim solution to improve cyclist safety on the route that can be implemented in 2025. A report on that work is expected back in about four months. Mark Cohoe, executive director of Bike Winnipeg, said the decision did offer some hope. “I think there was strong sentiment (among) the delegates to move towards 30 km/h, so obviously there’s disappointment there. At the same time, (the) other motions that were in there have important ramifications… I think (city council members) are sincere in their desire to see something (change) in 2025,” said Cohoe.

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