[ranchlandsselling]

Originally Posted by kermitology

Perhaps it's better to frame things in terms that are actually used by the city/planning: established communities, like Sunnyside, Bridgeland, Inglewood, Renfrew, as long time established communities, but there are a tonne of other established communities outside the core, which have been around for 20-30 years.

The big problem I personally see, as someone living in a century old neighbourhood like Inglewood, and soon to be Renfrew, is that infrastructure upgrades for those citizens almost always comes directly out of pocket of the homeowners, AND the taxes we're paying are going towards infrastructure costs of new communities.

Council likes to make the point that those new communities can become self sufficient based on their tax revenue, but their tax revenue is never capable of offsetting their initial and ongoing costs associated with building them in the first place. The city is well over a billion dollars in debt to developers right now.

And the same thing probably happened 20-30 years ago for those communities and 100 years ago for the other communities.

Who's paying the $1.0 million from the City of Calgary for the new weir? Surely the $3.4 million Alberta Lottery portion could be better spent? It's next to Inglewood, they should foot the entire bill. I don't walk/run/bike that far east that I ever see the weir.

Or the Central Memorial Park upgrade of $11.5 million. Surely the beltline communities should have paid for all of that? Because I'm not a male prostitute that hangs out in that park nor is it next to my community.

What about that Talisman Centre, $41.5 million, completely footed by Mission and Earlton residents? No? Probably should have been.

Or that free fare transit zone. Parasite inner city communities getting free transit when suburbanites has to pay to go from Fish Creek to whatever the next stop is.

No, I don't believe any of that makes sense. Just like new communities have start up costs that might be footed by the whole city. Guess what, we benefit from these communities being built, people moving to them, jobs being created wages increasing, housing prices increasing (forget 2008-2012) etc.