Raise the Hammer

Jim C, I get it you don't like developers. But how come you don't go after the developers who build endless poorly constructed housing in the suburbs, tearing up perfectly good farm land in the process. In exchange, we get boring communities with endless tract housing that does not pay for it self through their property taxes, and contributes to ever worsening traffic and infrastructure deficits. Don't like developers building condos downtown fine, but at the least, their development pays for itself by concentrating more taxpayers in a smaller more efficiently built up areas. These types of development efficiently reuses existing infrastructure, instead of having to build new infrastructure and in some cases, they are forced to pay for the upgrades to existing infrastructure.

Look, humans became bad for the environment the minute we developed fire and started to develop technology that removed us from the existing controls that nature uses to control animal populations. We can really only minimize the damage our existence as a species causes to the planet. Using technology like LRT and building more dense compact cities helps to limits that damage we cause.

Its also far more affordable for taxpayers to maintain denser cities, instead of building endless low density subdivisions that rely almost totally on the automobile as the main form of transport for most people. These suburban developments are built at such low densities with such heavily subsidized road based infrastructures, they almost never produce enough taxes to support their own existence. Which has been forcing city governments in Ontario since the 1950&60's to use local commercial taxes to prop up and pay for their suburban developments. Most larger cities have now reached a point that, these classic suburban development systems are now failing financially due to limits the province has put on how much of a city's property taxes can come from commercial taxes vs. residential property taxes. So something had to change. Unrestricted use of automobiles and primarily low density development, is out. walkable medium to higher density development supported by more bicycles and rapid transit, in the form of BRT and LRT, is in.