Comment 50978

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted October 31, 2010 at 14:29:19

Thanks to Hamilton's low development fees in the last decade, the average suburban house costs taxpayers ten or twenty thousand dollars more than we get back to extend even the bare minimum of services (water, roads etc) to them. Amalgamation was, is, and will continue to be flustered all to cluck, for a hundred reasons.

That being said, blaming social services for "bringing" poor people fails on every level. Not only does poverty exist where social services don't (rural residents have lower incomes than urban ones across the country), but not instituting the services only makes poverty worse. The absence of poor people in some suburbs is more a reflection of the high cost of living, inaccessibility and other factors which effectively forbid them from living there.

Meredith's right, though, words like "poor" and "rich" only tell part of the story. This is an issue which can never really be addressed without asking some very deep and probing questions about how ranked and stratified our society really is.

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford

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