Bringing in the ringers

The University of Windsor announced the creation of a new Cross-Border Transportation Studies Institute on Thursday. According to the press release, the new Research Chair, Dr. William Anderson, spent the past 10 years with Boston University as a part of the Department of Geography and Environment. Of particular interest to ScaleDown readers, Dr. Anderson (link to CV) was also a part of the Centre of Transportation Studies who, with third party funding, published a number of papers relating the economics of mass transit, new urbanism and the global economy and urban land use.

I spent a few weeks in Boston nearly a decade ago and witnessed, first hand, the enormity of the project passionately known as The Big Dig. Much like Toronto's battle with the ill-conceived Gardiner Expressway, Boston's core was butchered by a series of raised highways built in the 1950s as a way to alleviate urban traffic congestion. Instead, thousands of residents and businesses were displaced and neighbourhoods were alienated by a swath of elevated traffic. The billion dollar plus project moved the raised highway underground, added tunnel capacity and even had (although not implemented yet) a plan for a rail route connecting two of Boston's airports.

Now that Dr. Anderson has decided to make Windsor, and the Unversity, his new home, I am sure that we can expect to some outstanding and thought-provoking research out of the new Cross-Border Transportation Studies Institute. With the Institute's mandate to focus on cross-border transit we can finally look forward to an impartial voice on the DRTP and Greenlink, as well as some real experience in dealing with a large scale community transformation through infrastructure realignment. Let's hope that Dr. Anderson can avoid the political plague that mars so many of ideas in this city and push for some real, innovative and sustainable change.

Four More Years ?!?

That’s how long we’re putting the Community Improvement Plans for Sandwich, Downtown, Glengarry-Marentette, Ford City and Little River on hold. There have literally been hundreds of thousands of hours--those of our salaried administrative staff and the volunteer hours of prominent community leaders and residents--that have been invested into these documents.

Community Improvement Plans are a provincial governments requirement prior to a municipality requesting any incentive that would require a contribution from them. I’ve argued many times that Windsor is one of the largest cities in North America that has not offered targeted incentives to revitalized core neighbourhoods. London is our nearest Canadian example, and Detroit being our nearest geographical one. They’ve worked for both of those cities, as London has seen 5 new high rise apartments built in their core, and Detroit saw a population increase of over a thousand people in their core while the rest of the city had its population decrease by over 50 thousand.

Here is a brochure of incentives London has been offering for a decade. I don’t mind being a bit behind London when it comes to economic development, but waiting over 10 years is ridiculous. Tax Incentive Financing is the best example of an incentive that the experts say does not cost the taxpayers one red cent. Rate increases are phased in over 10 years on new investment, while the municipality still collects the taxes on the existing property as it was prior to the new investment. The city only gives up any revenue it wouldn't have received without the incentive. If we would have started this 10 years ago, the phase in would be done by now on any new developments that we would have seen. Not only that, but the province would be kicking in their portion of this tax incentive so technically we’d be getting provincial funding that I believe would be far greater than the costs of completing the community Improvement plan in itself.

Here is a great powerpoint presentation from New Mexico that explains the concept and benefits of TIF’s.

The effectiveness of this type of incentive has only been debated in Windsor. The debate has ended in 48 U.S. states and every other Canadian city in favour of this economic development tool. Think of it this way, had we simply completed one before we moved on to another, we would now have had the incentives in place for 3 years and would be able to judge them on their effectiveness, for a fraction of the costs invested.

This is not a give away. Windsorites claim they want “tax cuts now” and the best way to get them is to stop suburban sprawl. Core development saves moneys on infrastructure, less fire stations, road widenings and a host of other costs associated with sprawl.

We simply can’t afford to wait 4 more years to finish the Community Improvement Plans to help restart core development.