darwink
Senior Member
That was what was done before, and municipalities consistently failed to approve the zoning necessary to build the projects that were funded.
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Urban Development and Proposals Discussion
- Thread starter Surrealplaces
- Start date
trtcttc
Active Member
I know it’s easy to hate on city hall NIMBYs but they are simply acting in the interest of the people they represent. Those that live in the city and pay property taxes. If the Feds wants more immigrants, it is incumbent upon them to incentivize cities to build more rather than just blaming them for acting in their own interest.
darwink
Senior Member
That is what the feds are doing.
DougB
Active Member
Moving funding to completion would ensure that if zoning is truly the limiting factor, the incentive would be aligned. If something other than zoning is the problem, the incentive would also be aligned. Linking funding to zoning changes is great for hiring planners, community liaison people etc, but those are not outcomes.
DougB
Active Member
I still think the feds should stay out of housing as the problem is so regionally specific that a national approach would be too blunt. For example, zoning is not the primary blocker in Calgary, as it is in Toronto and Vancouver.
I also wonder how many fewer private sector units are added for each government funded unit. I suspect that each government dollar removes more than one private sector dollar as government is always less efficient.
darwink
Senior Member
Federal funding for capital (and most other things) is activity based and reimbursement only.
darwink
Senior Member
I think it is pretty hard to figure out these days, with the largest federal initiatives right now being below market rate loans and tax cuts (equivalent to 4 ish% of project cost) for market rental projects.
Now, the incentives might be changing unit tenure type but I think it would be pretty hard to say they are reducing the number of market rentals.
badc0ffee
Active Member
I like the honest treatment of "sprawl" and density here. Like yes, our outer neighbourhoods do not have an urban level of density. But we have nothing on the actual sprawl you see outside of Nashville, where you have houses on 1 acre, no sidewalks, no bus service, and absolutely nothing within walking distance, even a long walk.
I don't think Calgary is actually the 5th largest metro. Are we not larger than Ottawa? And the thing about 15-minute cities was a pointless aside. I don't see evidence that that movement has had an effect on our urban planning. "Awareness" of the concept doesn't even mean anything. 41% of Albertans being aware of this idea doesn't tell you how many buy into it in a negative or positive way, and it isn't that different of a number from 37% of British Columbians being aware.
Finally, and this is shallow, I like the content well enough, but these people are not good presenters. I could not listen to those voices for more than this 15 minute video.
Duck Lightning
Active Member
I believe they really messed up in that video on their definition of city limits verses metro city limits or the definition just has differences between Canada and the US because we do have acreage plots like Nashville if you look just outside the city limits.
This is NW of the city, just north of the 1A:
konradiical
Active Member
yeah Calgary is bigger than Ottawa as a metro im pretty sure we have 1.6 mil people in the CMA. i agree their voices are annoying idk why haha
while i agree Calgary has those type of sprawl too, it is very little comapred to almost any US city these "suburbs" stretch more a very long time and are everywhere
while i agree Calgary has those type of sprawl too, it is very little comapred to almost any US city these "suburbs" stretch more a very long time and are everywhere
Albertasaurus
Active Member
Yes but the difference is that most of Nashville within city limits is very low density, so that hundreds of thousands of people live in that very low density setting. In the Calgary region it's the~45,000 people in Rocky View County, and the ~20,000 in Foothills County who live in acreages and rural areas, while the balance of 1.7 or 1.8 million live in urban densities, whether in Calgary itself or suburbs like Airdrie. Calgary is still much denser than Nashville, with more than twice the population and only 60% of the land area.
The two urban regions are very different in how they have developed. I would summarize as "Calgary (also applies to Edmonton to a lesser degree) is a big city without a large rural catchment to swell its regional population. Nashville is a medium sized city that has a much larger catchment of rural areas and small towns around it."
Albertasaurus
Active Member
We are, but when the 2021 census came out Ottawa had jumped us by a few thousand. We're almost certainly back in 4th now, and probably by a decent margin the way the city has been growing recently.
I agree the 15 minute city thing is meaningless, as the percentages in BC and Ontario are so close to Alberta's that they likely fall within the margin of error.
Ottawa had added a new section of area to their metro and leapfrogged Calgary. A year later when the pop estimates came out Calgary was back in front again, and by now is probably a good 100k in front.
ByeByeBaby
Active Member
I pulled some data a while ago from the 2015 GHSL, which is a fine-level grid of global population. Here's the cumulative population distributions by density for Calgary, Edmonton (Vancouver as another point of reference) CMAs and the six US metros mentioned in the video (plus an average of all US metros in the 1-3 million range). It shows the difference between what sprawl is in Canada versus in the US:
Alternate version with log x axis:
It's not that Bearspaw or Heritage Pointe don't exist here; it's that they have a tiny fraction of the metro population, while in comparable cities, it's much higher. Taking 40-400 people per sq km as a broad range that includes all of the acreage area west and northwest of the city, about 1.4% of Calgary's population lives at that level. (3.0% in Edmonton, 1.7% in Vancouver). Salt Lake City is similar, at 1.8%, but then the other US cities are: Milwaukee 7.2%, Raleigh 7.9%, Jacksonville 9.8%, Providence 10.7%, Nashville 15.2%. (The Calgary CMA doesn't include Foothills, which also includes some of this low density housing, but even if it was included, it would be well under 2% of our metro population.)
And that exists most of the way up the curve in general; the median density in Calgary is around 4800 people per sq km (4000 in Edmonton, 6000 in Vancouver), but most of the US cities have median densities closer to 2000, and Nashville is all the way back around 1400 people per sq km; 1/3 of Calgary's median. The densest 10% of the US cities range from 8000 or so in the older cities - Providence and Milwaukee to half that in Nashville and Jacksonville. That low end is below the median density in Calgary, and even at the upper end, Calgary has twice as many people at densities of 8K and above.
But there's also a clear gap versus Vancouver at that high end, where our 90th percentile is at 12K or so, and Vancouver has twice as many people at that density. At 16K, Vancouver has 3 times as many people at that density. At 24K, Vancouver has 5.7% of their population and we have less than 1%.
US sprawl and Canadian sprawl are completely different beasts (Australian sprawl is a third kind altogether). It doesn't mean that we shouldn't build denser, but there is a reality there. And that's how we can have ideas like that we should serve all of our residents with public transit, for instance. That sub-500 or sub-1000 person range where transit just isn't feasible is a marginal element in Calgary, where in Nashville it's nearlng a majority.
trtcttc
Active Member
For a city that mostly developed when cars were available, I noticed Calgary has relatively narrow lots, even compared to Vancouver/Toronto and definitely narrower compared to the US. I wonder if that is just the timing of development? A guess (with no evidence) I have is that the weather restricts a lot of sprawl. Having giant yards and wide spacing of houses isn't great when there's snow for a good portion of the year. Whereas in Nashville it's more desirable.