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Originally Posted by GGG
The capital costs for servicing are paid for by the developer per hectare. For a while they only recovered the cost of the extension of the lines but not things like the capital cost of increasing the capacity of things like water treatment.
This was fixed I believe in the last round of increases. Bunk would be the best person to explain this as he has worked on both sides. I believe what developers don’t contribute to is the increased road infrastructure costs for arterial roads and services where expenses increase by area services rather than by population using the service.
What one should remember is that the modern burb is as dense as Hilhurst. They achieve quite high densities compared to existing communities. Again the sprawl problem is the boomers fault. Pre density increases neighbourhoods like the Bonnevistas and the loop of not quite innercity where NIMBYs continually oppose density increases like Brentwood.
Sprawl is caused my the amount of land you occupy not where that land is located. Also when people do property tax calculations that show that a suburb over its lifecycle will never pay for its costs they fail to account for the land value increases of every home closer to the inner city as population goes up the value of the most desirable land up.
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Indeed - you could say that the issue has really been resolved. On the capital side, 100% is more or less covered. There are major Transportation projects where the City contributes 40% because they are considered to have a city-wide benefit - something like a Ring Road interchange. On the operating side, as you said, the nature of the newest of communities being more dense, more mixed, and better laid out to improve operational efficiencies, combined with some recent changes to how emergency services are handled, new suburbs at worst are a net-neutral on the tax base in terms of servicing them.
This is all good news as for a long time, there was certainly an imbalance. When those "tax increases" for new growth were talked about at budget - a small amount was for infrastructure of the 14 new (transportation as I mentioned), but the lion's share was for services (transit, fire etc) for communities already under development, largely planned and started between 5 and 20 years ago when things weren't as well planned or accounted for through levies and such. The lag times are long in development.