Quote:
Originally Posted by bigguy1231
Unfortunately, you just don't understand simple economics. If you tell a developer, the people with the money, that they can't build something here, they will take their money and build it elsewhere. Thats why the brownfields have been a failure in this city. They are located in places where developers don't want to spend their money.
Thats why economic developement in this city has been almost nonexistant for the last 30 years. When a developer proposes to build something city council should be saying what can we do to help. Instead what happens in this city is council starts trying to tell them how to do things. Thats why developers move on to other cities like Burlington or Mississauga or any number of other places close by. It's their money, it's their risk, if you don't like what they are proposing then you better have a very good reason for saying no.
Urban sprawl is natural part of any cities growth. Cities have always sprawled then intensified, thats just the way it works. Living in a concrete box and using public transit isn't everyones idea of utopia.
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Do you think that Carl Turkstra understands simple economics? After all he does run a successful business,
http://www.hamiltoncatch.org/view_article.php?id=360
Comparing Hamilton to places like Burlington & Mississauga that lack a 150 years of manufacturing history is misguided and shows a misunderstanding of differences between the cities.
Rightly it's economics that developers go to the edges to develop. But not clean economics.
They buy the land cheaply, they sit on it for years paying the property taxes by renting it for farming, golf courses, driving ranges, low intensity businesses (i.e. antique markets, garden centres) and then develop with subsidized services (roads, water, sewer, etc). There are lots of links on The Spec's website to back that assertion. If you took away the subsidies to development the developer's behaviour would change. Why because the ecomonics would become at least 'cleaner' and brownfields would become more attractive.
Sprawl may be inevitable, but should also be controlled and properly managed. If they stopped developing at that edges then everyone's property would instantly become more valuable through the economics of supply & demand.