Quote:
Originally Posted by accord1999
Just because politicians say they want 50:50 doesn't mean that's what new residents and new home owners want. You can't force them to live where they don't want to live. Push too hard and you end up with 50:50 only because 150K potential new Calgarians ended up moving to the surrounding towns and cities, or not moving to Alberta at all.
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This is a very fair point, but my counter would be that the city certainly has a say in what they are willing to sell to prospective residents. Be it the farmland around the city, or retrofits into the existing infrastructure.
At the end of the day I’m pretty firm in my belief that unmitigated sprawl is bad for society as a whole, as cities should be built for human scale with many transportation options as oppose to vehicle scale and cars as the default option.
Obviously my personal position on the matter isn’t even a drop in the bucket when considering the market forces at play. But when I hear we’d need the resources of 6-7 planets to sustain the average Calgarian’s lifestyle if scaled to the entire population of earth… well I think it’s worth considering some aggressive pumping of the brakes when it comes to our city’s consumption of irreplaceable farm land.