Sprawl leads to infrastructure strain

[Jonno]

http://www.calgaryherald.com/touch/story.html?id=7635386

Urban sprawl can be blamed for many of the financial struggles currently experienced by the U.S., says Rollin Stanley, the City of Calgary's new...more
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BY JOSH SKAPIN, CALGARY HERALD DECEMBER 7, 2012
Cul-de-sacs were among Rollin Stanley's targets in a talk focused on challenges related to urban sprawl.

The city's new general manager of planning, development and assessment spoke at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. outlook conference in Calgary recently.

"Sprawl is critical to housing prices, including here in Calgary," says Stanley.

Since starting in the position as the city's top planner in June, Stanley has expressed interest in higher-density development, including condo towers, which he describes as, "taking what we've already built and super-sizing it."

"When you do three condo towers with 600 units on existing infrastructure and all you have to do is enlarge a sewer pipe, and you lower the parking requirements, you have inclusionary zoning housing to include affordable housing requirements — all of a sudden the world opens up for you," says Stanley, adding servicing single-family homes is a different story.

"Take those same 600 units, drop them on their side, give them 50 foot frontages and you've got two miles of infrastructure to build, it costs you a fortune, your housing costs go up and you're at the end of a freaking cul-de-sac."

Stanley blames sprawl for the financial struggles many U.S. cities are currently facing. "You will never in a million years raise the property tax enough on a single-family house to pay for the infrastructure that was put in the ground to provide for it," says Stanley.

"It's not the capital cost of constructing the housing; it's the replacement costs 40 years later that will kill us."

Stanley says there's been a recent increase in interest in building multi-use, mid-rise buildings along the Trans-Canada corridor.

"We've got all this land that we're building cul-de-sacs on and that takes away pressure from the interior lots where the true value of the buildings on it is less than 50 per cent of the land, and that's usually a pretty good indication that something is going to happen on it," says Stanley, adding cul-de-sacs are subsidized "through the construction of the infrastructure."

Stanley also took aim at policy putting affordable housing in an area that forces people to drive to work as an impact on the "foreclosure crisis," in some U.S. states.

"As soon as gas went up to $5 a gallon, Jean and her husband Bob could no longer afford their mortgage, because they both needed to drive to get to work," says Stanley.

And while some blame that on gas prices, he calls it bad housing policy.

"The amount they were spending on transportation went from 18 per cent of household costs to about 37 per cent of household costs and they couldn't cope," says Stanley.

The CMHC housing outlook conference featured analysis and estimations on housing starts, the average price of new homes and resale activity in Calgary and regions across Alberta by economic analysts.