Recent growth in Hamilton continues to be overwhelmingly on greenfields and the older urban areas are actually losing population. It’s a trend that must be reversed to take advantage of the billion dollar LRT investment but current city policies are making it worse according to a renowned Toronto planner.
Pamela Blais contends Hamilton is financially subsidizing both sprawl and car dependency, much of it at direct cost to the property taxpayer, and that it needs to shift to supporting intensification especially along the LRT corridor “in order to really capitalize on the opportunity that’s being presented” by provincial funding.
“The status quo that we have now is really a market that’s distorted by public policy and hidden subsidies,” said Blais, whose major study Planning for Prosperity: Globalization, Competitiveness, and the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, was released a few days before her free Hamilton lecture. The latter was hosted by the Useful Knowledge Society of Hamilton and the Hamilton-Burlington Society of Architects and held at Mills Hardware on November 26. It was videotaped by the Public Record.
She reported that in the 2001-11 decade, there was a population loss of 6000-7000 people in the already urbanized area of Hamilton. During the same period 10,000 units were added to the greenfields along with a population gain of about 35,000.
This continues a long term trend that saw massive population drops in the older parts of Hamilton in the last quarter of the twentieth century. While the population below the escarpment in the old city of Hamilton fell by over 40,000 between the 1971 and 1996 censuses, the numbers south of Mohawk Road climbed by 60,000.
The city is also failing to meet the minimum infill levels required by the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe that requires at least 40 percent of new residences by this year be constructed within the already built up area. Over the last few years the annual rate has varied between 24 and 36 percent.
But in the last four years, the city has only averaged 30 percent with the remainder of the nearly 8000 new units located on greenfields and nearly all of those were lower density townhouses or single-family dwellings. The highest growth rates have been in Binbrook, Ancaster and Waterdown where apartment construction has been minimal.
Similarly, Blais noted that most major employment growth is taking place in the suburban areas with a continuing decline in the lower city. In her view, both trends increase congestion and are the opposite of what is needed to support the LRT. A recent comprehensive study concluded that suburban residents drive three times as much as their urban counterparts, and Blais cited similar figures for Hamilton.
“So Hamilton really seems to face a double challenge,” she warned. “There is loss happening in the inner area, so before we can even get to the point of kind of getting back to the black, there’s a lot of development that has to be added just to regain losses in terms of population and employment to get back to even to 2011 levels.”
City spending plans also seem to ignore the LRT opportunity as council continues to fund new road construction ahead of transit improvements with about twice as much spending planned for the former over the latter in the next five years including $46 million earmarked for two new parking garages.
“If you’re contemplating a new way of travelling in the city and you keep spending the same way you have in the past on auto infrastructure, it’s not really going to support that shift,” Blais advised. “It jumps out that if you’re contemplating an LRT downtown you probably wouldn’t want to be building a parking structure downtown.”
Blais’ 2010 book – Perverse Cities: Hidden Subsidies, Wonky Policy, and Urban Sprawl – has won wide acclaim and was short-listed for the Donner Prize for best public policy book of the year. She delivered a public lecture on it in the fall of 2011, and also met with councillors and city staff about her recommendations.