We are blindfolded until secondary plans completed
Winnipeg Free Press
Saturday April 24 2004
By Christopher Leo
SPRAWL is again on the agenda as city council begins consideration of the proposed Waverley West development on 3,000 acres in southwest Winnipeg.
It is now widely understood that urban sprawl causes a great many problems. It forces us to overbuild road, water and sewer systems to serve far-flung, low-density neighbourhoods, and then we choke on the costs of maintaining both the new infrastructure and that in older neighbourhoods.
As the city spreads, we are obliged to pay for emergency services, library branches, community centres, schools, and a transit system to serve a population more thinly spread out with each passing decade. Residential property taxes rise to cover all these costs and it becomes easier for adjacent municipalities to offer municipal services at a lower cost. With development leapfrogging into rural municipalities, provincial taxpayers face demands for road improvements and water supply from those who have fled the city, and the costs of sprawl mount yet again.
Will Waverley West be another leap forward for sprawl or, as its proponents maintain, is this extension of the city needed to meet the next decade's demand for housing? Strictly speaking, no one knows the answer to that question, because the alternatives have not been studied. To see why this is true, we have to look at how the development of Winnipeg is planned. Plan Winnipeg 2020 Vision contains a city map with land uses indicated by colours. The downtown area is pink, and the rest is yellow, grey or white.
White indicates rural areas within city limits, including Waverley West, where urban development is not (yet) permitted. Yellow marks neighbourhoods or future neighbourhoods and grey indicates areas reserved for industry. That sounds like a plan, until you realize that "neighbourhood" can mean anything from big box stores through shopping malls and high-rise apartments to single-family homes.
Much of the yellow areas consists of existing inner city or suburban neighbourhoods, but a significant proportion is empty land. Some of this is located at the outer edge of the developed areas, but a substantial amount is located within built-up areas. To add to the uncertainty, the grey areas include more space than is needed for industrial development. An undetermined proportion of this land, therefore, can be made available for re-designation as future neighbourhoods. Then there is the land now occupied by the soon to be vacated Kapyong Barracks. When this land becomes available it will be a prime location for the development of a new neighbourhood of either 160 acres or 240 acres.
Land available
In short, a lot of land is available which, if developed, would bring in more taxpayers to make use of existing infrastructure and services. They would help us to pay the bills while increasing them less than new residents at the fringe would. Such development is referred to as infill.
How much space is there for infill development? Winnipeg's planners don't know, but they're working on it.
Land development is like a conveyor belt. Developers identify pieces of land they own or can acquire to develop profitably, decide what they want to develop there and make a proposal to the city. In the absence of any land designation more specific than "neighbourhood" and industrial, the development process is driven primarily -- not by a reasoned assessment of how we can make the best use of our land -- but by developers' calculations of where the best profit can be had.
At last count, 7,223 single-family lots had been proposed for development and were at some stage of city council's approval process. If Winnipeg's development proceeds at the same average rate as it has over the past decade, this is a seven-and-a-half-year supply of land. City planners have undertaken a mapping project designed to identify what other infill land is available for development. Indications are that the total amount of developable infill will add up to multiples of the amount now on the conveyor belt -- likely at least a 20-year supply, which, according to a standard planning calculation, is enough to accommodate demand without leading to inflation of land prices.
If Winnipeg were following the normal practice in many other North American cities, the broad designation of land as neighbourhood, industrial or rural would be followed by the development of secondary plans for undeveloped areas classified as neighbourhoods. These plans, which would be passed by council and have the force of law, would consist of such things as a map of the infrastructure for each neighbourhood, provisions relating to designation of open space, provisions for the protection of ecologically sensitive areas and permitted land uses. As a result of a push in recent years to catch up, a few secondary plans now exist, but much of the developable land remains unplanned.
Secondary plans should be based on having considered how each parcel of land could best be developed to meet market demands, to make efficient use of the city's network of infrastructure and services, and to minimize the costs of transit service. Development should also be planned in such a way as to offer an appropriately wide choice of housing types and neighbourhood styles, and to be adaptable to different uses as the city grows.
Developments
This could have the additional benefit of shaking up our development industry, which is minimally competitive at best, and which, in recent years, has offered little more than a series of cookie-cutter developments, while homebuyers in many other metropolitan areas have enjoyed a much wider range of choice.
Until the planners have completed secondary plans covering all developable neighbourhoods in Winnipeg, not only are we blindfolded as we try to decide whether (or when) to develop Waverley West, we are failing utterly to prevent sprawl.
The fact that we have land available for development that adds up to multiples of the seven-and-a-half years' worth already in the pipeline suggests there is no urgency about approving the development of the further 20 or 30 years' supply that is represented by Waverley West's 3,000 acres. What is urgent is the completion of secondary plans for all the land already available.
The city should hire as many planners as are needed to get the job done quickly, and then decide what to do about Waverley West. A full evaluation of all available infill might well produce the conclusion that it will soon be time to proceed with some part of Waverley West -- possibly the northern portion -- but we will not know if that is a good decision until we have looked at the alternatives.
It probably will be argued that the city can't afford to hire more planners. The obvious answer is that, considering the costs of sprawl, the city can't afford not to spend the money.
Christopher Leo is a research associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.