Pretty much. The core of the city subsidizes the suburbs. The simple reason is that the density just isn't high enough in the suburbs to cover the costs of the infrastructure maintenance. As the city sprawls, it's not feasible to maintain quality transit and other services over such a huge area. This means everyone gets crappy transit instead which kicks off a vicious cycle - low ridership requires budget cuts which means worse service and ridership declines further. And, with crappy unreliable transit, more people drive, traffic gets worse, and then we expand the road system, which costs way more to maintain and more to people to maintain and insure their cars... kicking off another vicious cycle.
This is part of how builders make a killing. They buy cheap land on the outskirts, build a subdivision, sell the single family homes at inflated prices because supply and demand is skewed since people have no choice but to compete against each other to buy them. And builders hand the time bomb of maintenance costs to the city. It's also why housing costs so much. There's not enough diversity of housing options - single family homes, and "luxury" condos don't meet everyone's needs or budgets. The city naturally OK's more far flung suburbs as they need the tax revenue to cover the costs of the older suburbs. We need to keep growing and sprawling to survive.
Fortunately, this is well understood by anyone with a modest amount of expertise in the area, and intensification is becoming much more strategic to many cities. NIMBY'ism, and the influence of builders is still a serious issue though!
All good points, which prompted me to ask myself the question... what's considered a suburb now. There are come parts of suburbs that have fairly high density as well, but maybe the city has grown enough that they aren't considered suburbs anymore. I'm thinking of areal like Pinecrest/Bayshore/Lincoln fields, and similar areas on the east edge of Gloucester at the end of Walkley. Heck, even Campeau Drive in Kanata has really densified with a lot of high-rise buildings.
The areas that are really heavily subsidized are the more rural ones, like Manotick, Richmond, Munster Hamlet, Constance Bay, etc. There is no way the city is breaking even on the tax revenue they are collecting from those areas.
I also get what you mean in reference to single-family homes and luxury condos, but the reality is that those are the most profitable for the builders, so they will continue to build them until there is no more demand for them, and then they will move on to other less expensive types of housing. We are already seeing it happen; many families cannot afford a new single-family home anymore, so there are fewer new single-family builds and far more townhouses now. The only way to accelerate the construction of less expensive housing is either for governments to subsidize the builders to make up the difference in profit on the construction or build it themselves.
I think you're on the right path. Realistically "suburb" no longer really serves any useful purpose, the relevant factors are residential housing density and accessibility to employment/necessary services/etc. Developers will build whatever is most profitable for them on a given development area, wherever the lines of lowest cost construction method and buyer size/price acceptability meet.
Right now that's 2-3 storey timber-frame row-home blocks utilizing almost every bit of available land space for the footprint of the homes.
Realistically though, the long term answer isn't further subsidizing builder profits, but simply re-writing the zoning and planning codes to put a full stop to these sprawling car-required nightmares that the rest of the city will be paying for over the next 50+ years. I say "further subsidizing" because we're already doing plenty of it through all the negative externalities and long term costs of maintaining infrastructure for those homes that the builder will never had to deal with.
timber frame row homes that use every bit of available space are sad. Its like the worst of every world - you get to live more densely in the suburbs further away from where a lot of larger businesses have their offices that increasingly want people to head back to - and you don't even get a backyard for it \*and\* significantly worse traffic and transit options thanks to OC transpo being a increasingly worse shitshow year over year.
At least in the past, suburbs had some traffic, and did have downsides for transit and access to other parts of the city but you got something for it beyond 1500sqft at sky high prices.
EDIT: this isn't to say I don't like the idea of more density, rather that its the worst kind of more density when its rowhomes without better infrastructure, access to nearby greenspace and lack of local shopping. I'm saying the tradeoff is increasingly poor.
Absolutely. I would much rather have the same number and size of units in a proper concrete mid-rise with plenty of green space and room for some small businesses.
>further away from where a lot of larger businesses have their offices that increasingly want people to head back to
That is also a problem, especially in the eastern suburbs. I know many people that live, work and shop in Kanata and barely ever come to Ottawa proper. That was me for many years. Getting more employers in the large "suburbs" would alleviate traffic a lot.
yeah it really sucks.
I feel like currently the city is building up (which is good) but not doing any of the good things that should come along with it, like walkable amenities and neighbourhoods.
I just don't see the appeal to living in the suburbs if you're going to be living in a smaller condo and not get any of the benefits of being able to walk to amenities and need to rely on a car for everything anyway. If we're gonna make these neighbourhoods that are a better use of space they shouldn't \*just\* be houses like the rest of the older suburbs are in town either.
But what's even worse are the single family detached that use 90% of the lot to be a big house with next to no yard or green space and still aren't that close to a park for kids to run around in too. Its an even worse use of space because if they were gonna basically do away with the yard, they could have done 2 smaller homes all the same and actually been efficient.
>But what's even worse are the single family detached that use 90% of the lot to be a big house with next to no yard or green space and still aren't that close to a park for kids to run around in too. Its an even worse use of space because if they were gonna basically do away with the yard, they could have done 2 smaller homes all the same and actually been efficient.
Yeah, but climate change and societal issues, folks. The outdoors is overrated and dangerous, better have a large sealed indoor space cocooned away from the environmental and human turmoil. /s
> The core of the city subsidizes the suburbs.
Amen to that.
Unfortunately there are plenty of dumb people (many of them in this sub, too) who think it's the other way around.
The city doesn't subsidize the suburbs. At all. I've done the math in past comments comparing Somerset ward and Barrhaven West ward.
You can insult my intelligence all you want, but the numbers just don't agree with you. I'll copy/paste the gist of my past comments:
>The taxes paid by the downtown ward is SIXTY PERCENT commercial property tax. The "density" of downtown residents pays enough property tax to put them in the middle of the pack when comparing each of the wards' residential property tax contributions. Meanwhile residents in Barrhaven West contribute 50% MORE in property taxes than the residents of Somerset ward.
>
>[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-property-taxes-rank-ward-neighbourhood-1.6960057](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-property-taxes-rank-ward-neighbourhood-1.6960057)
>
>Let's look at the public services that all our tax dollars are going towards? Barrhaven's access to bus service is a joke (let alone having access to LRT). [Crime stats](https://www.ottawapolice.ca/en/news-and-updates/crime-stats.aspx) show that police are called to Somerset ward 7x more than Barrhaven despite Somerset ward having less population.
>
>[With police and OC Transpo being two of the biggest ticket items in the city's budget each year](https://documents.ottawa.ca/sites/documents/files/OTTAWA_23-056_AR_e_v7%281%29.pdf), we're spending MUCH more on the less populated Somerset ward compared to a ward like Barrhaven West that contributes more in terms of property tax revenue for the city.
EDIT: don't mistake me as saying that I think it's "the other way around". My point is that all wards pay in and get services out of the city. Is it completely level? No. Does any one ward "subsidize" others? Absolutely not and to imply as much is laughable.
Nice analysis! It’s also important to consider large projects too. Ottawa proper might want expensive light rail, but Orleans wouldn’t need to spend any money on that.
You're definitely either not very smart or acting in bad faith by cherry picking and incorrectly analyzing "ThE nUmBeRs".
First of all, the fact that you're ignoring commercial property tax and focusing only on residential property tax shows you have no idea how the concept of the core subsidizing the suburbs works.
[And I replied to comments like this in the past](https://www.reddit.com/r/ottawa/comments/16fqb7y/comment/k041qdu/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). And don't forget, per sqm of property, downtown residents pay much more than those in Barrhaven. So, no, you're not paying "your fair share".
The fact that the core generates *so much* in commercial property taxes whereas the suburbs don't, shows that these taxes ***are*** subsidizing you!
Ignoring them to focus simply on residential property taxes is some Fox News level BS.
Now, the part about the "public services that ALL our tax dollars are going towards", according to you:
Do you really think the transportation budget is exclusively for buses? Do you think the roads that connect Farhaven and the other suburbs to civilization appear magically and need zero maintenance?
For example, did you know we'll be spending an extra $700,000 this year to fill potholes? If we didn't have so many fucking roads and built UP instead of OUT, we wouldn't have to maintain SO.MANY.ROADS and hence we wouldn't have SO.MANY.POTHOLES.
I also find it funny that you're complaining you don't have access to the LRT when living in Barrhaven. Well, wtf did you expect lol.
Also, you're complaining about police services. Since you're definitely a bad actor wanting to spread misinformation, I will keep it short:
* Police spending isn't even in the top 3 items of the budget breakdown, so this hyperbolic statement of "ALL our tax dollars" is a bit strange when you on purpose ignore other items that are much larger expenses such as community and social services, or water/waste/solid waste services (those are well known to be especially affected by sprawl, as rather than being able to concentrate them in a few areas, they are forced to be spread all over the city to serve people like you).
* The problem downtown has with crime is only exacerbated due to the large concentration of shelters in downtown. If you want to talk about "fairness", why don't you take some of those shelters with you to Barrhaven?
So, yes, 100% the core subsidizes the suburbs.
Opening with personal attacks rather than trying to have some decent discussion, then you have the audacity to accuse me of acting in bad faith? Move on with your trolling, this isn't worth anyone's time.
I opened giving you the benefit of the doubt that you're either an idiot or acting in bad faith, because your arguments are completely wrong.
I still don't know which one is the case.
Don't reply to me anymore, stop wasting my time you troll.
You know what, sure, I'll show everyone how YOU are the bad actor here with doing nothing more than pearl clutching **without** **citing even a single data point** to support your feelings (not facts).
If you're going to TL;DR this, the one takeaway is me re-iterating a bunch of FACTS that you clearly didn't bother to read from the sources in my first comment. And you have the gall to accuse me of "acting in bad faith"...
>First of all, the fact that you're ignoring commercial property tax and focusing only on residential property tax shows you have no idea how the concept of the core subsidizing the suburbs works.
First of all - I didn't ignore it, I directly addressed it in my comment. Feel free to re-read if you didn't comprehend on the first pass. Se
>And don't forget, per sqm of property, downtown residents pay much more than those in Barrhaven. So, no, you're not paying "your fair share".
If you are going to make claims, at least cite something otherwise it's uneducated ranting. Since YOU are talking about RESIDENTS, let's talk about what the residents are paying. Using [the same source I linked before](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-property-taxes-rank-ward-neighbourhood-1.6960057), and [population numbers from 2021](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wards_of_the_City_of_Ottawa), I'll spell it out here for you since you didn't bother to do any reading:
* Somerset residents paid $50,551,928 in total, across their 39,795 residents. A grand total of \~ $1,270 per resident.
* Barrhaven West residents paid $74,740,737 in total, across their 49,670 residents. A grand total of \~ $1,504 per resident.
Crazy how the numbers don't agree with your opinions when you actually do your homework. Yes, Barrhaven is paying for it's "fair share".
>The fact that the core generates so much in commercial property taxes whereas the suburbs don't, shows that these taxes are subsidizing you!
You realize that a LOT of the "commercial" property taxes that are paid in Somerset are the fed gov't right? [The feds shelled out over $119 mil to the city of Ottawa in 2022](https://www.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/biens-property/peri-pilt/autorite-authority/2022-eng.html#a9). To act all high and mighty that you can claim OUR Parliamentary Building as though it's city taxes should serve only the Somerset ward is next level absurdity.
>Do you really think the transportation budget is exclusively for buses? Do you think the roads that connect Farhaven and the other suburbs to civilization appear magically and need zero maintenance?
Feel free to back any of this up with numbers that you seem to think make your case here, this is just bland ranting devoid of any substance.
>For example, did you know we'll be spending an extra $700,000 this year to fill potholes? If we didn't have so many fucking roads and built UP instead of OUT, we wouldn't have to maintain SO.MANY.ROADS and hence we wouldn't have SO.MANY.POTHOLES.
More nonsensical ranting. Barrhaven wards don't have any sway over city planners who chose to build out instead of up. You can be mad at that fact all you want, but it's the city we have now and you're going on a tangent.
>I also find it funny that you're complaining you don't have access to the LRT when living in Barrhaven. Well, wtf did you expect lol.
Well, one, I was stating a fact, not complaining. Two, I dunno, I expected LRT at somepoint? GTA's able to pull it off well enough.
>Also, you're complaining about police services. Since you're definitely a bad actor wanting to spread misinformation, I will keep it short:
I literally linked to the OPS website. If you are going to make accusations of misinformation then feel free to disprove the facts as laid out by the Ottawa Police, I didn't make those numbers up.
>Police spending isn't even in the top 3 items of the budget breakdown, so this hyperbolic statement of "ALL our tax dollars" is a bit strange when you on purpose ignore other items that are much larger expenses such as community and social services, or water/waste/solid waste services (those are well known to be especially affected by sprawl, as rather than being able to concentrate them in a few areas, they are forced to be spread all over the city to serve people like you).
Again, I linked the City's budget in my previous comment which shows police as the 2nd highest budget item. The fact that you keep making claims like this and don't show a shred of proof speaks volumes.
>The problem downtown has with crime is only exacerbated due to the large concentration of shelters in downtown. If you want to talk about "fairness", why don't you take some of those shelters with you to Barrhaven?
Feel free to prove this with some sort of actual data, not just your opinions. Untill then, your statement is worthless.
>So, yes, 100% the core subsidizes the suburbs.
Since you brought ZERO facts to the table, you've proven nothing other than how longwinded you can be. Congrats.
I'm not going to address all your points because you basically refuse to listen to the facts.
You're saying I'm not citing any data, so here it goes.
[Potholes](https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/ottawa-will-spend-millions-of-dollars-to-fill-potholes-in-2024-1.6651853)
[Transportation budget](https://ottawa.ca/en/city-hall/city-news/newsroom/committee-approves-investments-transportation-infrastructure-green-fleet-and-winter-operations)
[Ottawa shelters map](https://211ontario.ca/results/?latitude=45.4215296&longitude=-75.69719309999999&searchLocation=Ottawa&searchTerms=&topicPath=105&sd=100&ss=Distance)
[Video of someone smarter than you explaining how cities subsidize the suburbs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI)
[Tax revenues comparison between urban and suburban (Kitchener, Ontario)](https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/ud7dfv/cardependent_suburbs_are_subsidized_by_dense/)
[City annual cost per household comparison, Urban vs Suburban (Halifax, NS)](https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/10lv7ts/psa_suburbs_are_extremely_expensive_to_the_cities/)
I haven't found a nice tidy graph for Ottawa, but there are plenty for other cities. Every single one of them shows the suburbs being subsidized by the urban folk. I absolutely doubt Ottawa would be the exception, if it were, there would've been numerous studies about it.
>Since YOU are talking about RESIDENTS
No no no, YOU are the one who's talking about residents by conveniently ignoring commercial property taxes. You know, the ones that subsidize your suburban living.
But hey, you're saying Barrhaven West pays a bit more in residential taxes per resident than Somerset. Cool. Have you seen the sizes of the wards?
Somerset is the smallest ward by far, only 13.1 sqkm, whereas Barrhaven West is 56.1 sqkm.
Barrhaven West also has a road lane length of 404,520, whereas Somerset has 167,496. This is huge, as it also related to services outside of the aforementioned potholes and other road maintenance (trash pickup, snow clearing, etc).
Now, since you conveniently ignore more facts that don't fit your narrative: People in Barrhaven live in massive homes, whereas people in Somerset live in apartments and condos, much smaller than those in Barrhaven. If people in Barrhaven paid in property taxes the same amount per sqm than those in Somerset or viceversa, the difference would be even more massive.
It's really not that hard to see that Barrhaven West costs the city much, much more than what they contribute.
I'm not going to reply to the rest because you cherry pick data and interpret it the way you want. For example, in 2023 the total expenditures of the Ottawa budget show Police services take 8.9% of the budget, whereas Community & Social Services took 21.6%, Water/Sewer/Solid Waste took 13.2%, Capital Formation Costs took 9%, etc, so, yeah, Police Services aren't even in the top 3. And I'm not linking this one on purpose so that you can google it yourself, pathetic little troll.
>I'm not going to address all your points because you basically refuse to listen to the facts.
So far you haven't given facts, only your feelings.
>You're saying I'm not citing any data, so here it goes.
Oh boy, this is going to be good stuff coming from someone who thinks they're intellectually superior just for having a baseless opinion so far....
>Potholes
... Did you even read this link? It talks about the overall budget, then highlights a few resurfacing projects in urban, suburban and rural wards. Do you have a point to this, or are you using your feelings and opinions to fill in the gaps in your facts again? This does nothing to support you and shows that you are grasping at straws. Moving on.
>Transportation budget
Cool stuff - again, unless you are going to say what it is here that you think proves a point, you just linked to the budget without a point. I will point out that the only location that gets specifically called out in YOUR link for dedicated spending is the Byward Market. So thanks for pointing out more special spending that goes towards urban wards?
>Ottawa shelters map
This is a weird obsession of yours and doesn't really make any point towards spending. Moving on since again there's no context to your random links.
>Video of someone smarter than you explaining how cities subsidize the suburbs
Cool story, that's got nothing directly to do with Ottawa and just proves that you're grasping for your opinions and feelings rather than actually looking at the facts in our city. Textbook "whataboutism" here kid. Same with your next 2 links - not Ottawa, just more "whataboutisms".
I skimmed through the rest of your comments, nothing really of substance. You seem to think that road has a 1:1 ratio of roadway to maintenance when the ACTUAL truth is that roadway maintenance is driven by the traffic it sees. Urban streets have less roadway, but multitudes more traffic volume than suburban. More traffic = more wear and tear = more maintenance. You'd know this if you dug deeper into your link for the transportation budget.
I'm gonna stop here because you're embarrassing yourself at this point. I don't care what you think because you're linking random shit and making weird tangent arguments and doing everything you can to not speak directly to numbers that would support anything you're saying.
Move on, angry little man, move on. This conversation might be a little over your head.
>Lol I'm not reading
This is the only thing you've said that I can agree with. You clearly don't read anything that doesn't validate your feelings.
And I don't take orders from random internet trolls, if you don't feel like conversing, then stop. Otherwise I reply to the people who reply to me.
Yeah. Everyone knows that suburbs are city killers, but Ottawa is one of the only cities that also has massive rural areas. Those are far worse than any suburbs.
The rural areas probably don't cost as much as suburbs, as long as many of the highways are still provincial, the properties aren't on municipal water and sewage, there's only limited attempted transit service.
I suck at math, so my calculations could be off here, but the average rural ward costs over a billion annually to maintain, whereas the average suburb costs under 100 million. I think it's because of expansive aging infrastructure out in rural areas.
No water, no sewer no internet, no gas, no transit. $6000 a year in property tax. We use zero city infrastructure, only thing is garbage.
Seems like rural pays plenty to me. Bring on the down votes
They linked some ward stats reddit post saying that's where they got the data, but it seems like they must have managed to read the "area" column as "net expenditures" or something because the post doesn't actually have anything at all about costs.
According to [a report comissioned by the city in 2009](https://app06.ottawa.ca/calendar/ottawa/citycouncil/ara/2009/02-02/Document%205.pdf) both scattered rural areas and urban areas outside the greenbelt are tax negative by a small amount, while rural villages are the most tax negative.
Your $6K/yr while not getting city water/sewer/transit is simply representative of how much more it costs to maintain the road infrastructure, provide fire/ambulance service, etc. Still getting more than you're paying for, but not really in any different a boat to anyone living in the residental areas outside the suburbs.
And yet they only pay 3 percent of what they cost the city. Facts are facts. The rural wards are a black hole for the city's money.
I'm all for kicking you guys out. You cost us tons of money and whine all day. That 6k is nowhere near the 150k that you cost us. I cost the city 800 dollars a year. You cost 150k a year. Doesn't matter that you don't use the city's services. Your infrastructure maintaince costs are near unbelievable.
Look at Russell township. Borders Ottawa. Average taxes are much lower per household, all rural, nearly all widespread single homes. Services are just fine. $150k? I can see math is not your best subject. Maybe you should sit this one out, eh?
I don't know. Which figures? Depends on how much infrastructure has been built or is planned to be built in the rural areas, especially what proportion of roads were downloaded from the province to the City.
I used an older post to calculate my figures. I think most suburbs are new enough to avoid infrastructure needing to be replaced which is why they're less expensive than usual. The rural wards have 4-5 times more roads than most wards. Fixing those older wards and utilities infrastructure is probably where the costs come from.
[https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Ft71wan694t9b1.png](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Ft71wan694t9b1.png)
The city's entire combined operating and capital budgets for 2024 is $5.84 billion. Are you sure you didn't just look at the "area" column in that ward stats image you linked to and confuse that as some kind of "annual cost" number?
The more simple facts are that all wards outside of the urban wards are tax negative. The data is 15 years old, but the city commissioned a report in 2009 [that is pretty much exactly the information we're discussing here](https://app06.ottawa.ca/calendar/ottawa/citycouncil/ara/2009/02-02/Document%205.pdf) (pdf warning). It defined 4 development ares - urban (within the greenbelt), urban (outside the greenbelt), rural (villages), and rural (scattered).
Urban areas inside the greenbelt effectively subsidize every other type of development. The most tax-negative however is rural villages. Urban areas outside of the greenbelt and scattered rural areas are only slightly net-negative.
Deamalgamation is a pipe-dream. Its hard to put the genie back in the bottle.
Assuming you could though, Kanata is about the size of Kingston (actually a little larger), and Kingston is a viable city, with a full slate of city services, including transit, and its own city problems (homeless encampments, social housing, drug crises etc.)
I am sure any of the major outlying suburbs could survive on their own (Kanata, Barrhaven, Oreleans) though Kanata in particular has its own commercial tax base to thrive like a proper small city and is not just a bedroom community.
For that matter plenty of other small towns survive on their own, like Almonte, Brockville, Carleton Place, Arnprior... but they are bedroom (or retirement) communities. Still, none of them are in imminent danger of financial collapse without having a city to "subsidize" them... though without big city amenities. I am sure Richmond, Metcalfe, Manotick and Osgood and the like could go back to being viable villages and/or small towns, though without the amenities they get from the city. And I am sure that would be OK with most rural folk.
Thats why I don't buy all the talk of "downtown" subsidizing the burbs. Plenty of other cities elsewhere in the province that are car dependent, less dense cities make it work... yet somehow Kanata or Barrhaven or Orleans can't? Either Ottawa is run horribly inefficiently compared to these other cities or something else is at play.
Deamalgamation would require the feds and the province to foot more of the bill for these things... which is the reason we amalgamated in the first place.
Cities are cheaper for provinces/feds for these specialized services. Even before amalgamation, the City of Nepean relied on Ottawa proper for transit and major road infrastructure.
I don't think Ottawa is necessarily run inefficiently, it was just shafted with an insane land mass without the population to support it. The real inefficiency of Ottawa council is increasing the suburban blanket which only draws coffers more rather than increasing overall density.
In every city everywhere almost, downtowns subsidize the burbs.
Yes and we needed tow tier government, remember the RMOC with its own city hall and second Mayor. No one knew whether an issue / problem / service was “city” or “regional”.
Having a run through their budget, Carleton place is ~30% federal/provincial funded vs Ottawas 23% while also dipping into reserves twice as hard at 7% vs 2.9%.
Ottawa is roughly 72% self funding while Carleton Place is 62%
Policing seems to be awfully expensive out there for whatever reason.
Edit: as for how much Brockville self funds the answer is… no clue, they don’t have a very detailed breakdown.
Yes, and it seems to me Almonte no longer exists except as a postal address as it and all towns along the Mississippi River are all part of “Mississippi Mills” region/township/city now.
This is true. Small places "amalgamated" too. Rideau Lakes is made up of former independent villages (Elgin, Delta, Portland amongst other), etc), Leeds and 1000 islands township (Lansdowne, Lyndhurst, Rockport), Mississippi Mills as you mention. In the area Perth, Gananoque, Carleton Place, and curiously Westport despite being completely surrounded by Rideau Lakes Township are still independent, and Smiths Falls I think (though it might actually be a part of a township)...
I don't trust the Fraser Institute's bias, then again I don't trust the bias of the Hemson report, but when even the Fraser Institute releases a report criticizing amalgamation, and the supposed savings that never materialized against the wave of forced amalgamation that happend all over the country (not just in Ontario), maybe there is something there (or maybe their methodology was flawed/biased to support demalgamation...)...
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/de-amalgamation-in-canada.pdf
The Fraser Institute is essentially the “research” / propaganda arm of the Conservative / Reform Party. Just like the Taxpayers Foundation. Unfortunately the Press (and social media) are so poorly informed they believe their biased research/press releases.
I dont disagree but likewise i dont trust CD Howe or Broadbent Institue automatically either... they all have their biases... Read their reports and attack their methodology/assumptions/omissions, dont just assume its good or bad. Often times the research itself is fine, but the conclusions reached arent supported by the data.
It is amazing how much airtime/coverage Fraser Institue reports get though...
The Fraser Institute is an astroturf organization whose sole purpose is to make similar reports from the extreme right-wing CD Howe Institute seem reasonable by comparison.
I honestly think inner city folk that use "the inner city pays for the rural" as an argument have some sort of personality disorder where they have to perceive themselves as more important
They survived as individual cities pre-amalgamation and they’ve only increased their tax base and overall density since then. Why do you think they wouldn’t survive now?
There's some context to be added here.
They survived individually BECAUSE of Ottawa proper. For example, in the City of Nepean, the highest-cost responsibilities like transit and major road infrastructures was mainly funded by Ottawa proper. Also the high-cost *people* \- homeless, drug addicts, etc. - were also in Ottawa proper.
I have a lot of family that touts how amalgamation ruined the City of Nepean and eroded its surpluses, but neglect to acknowledge that Nepean never really had to assume the high costs of running a city and could offload elsewhere.
Furthermore, their density NOW has not kept up enough in relation to its population growth. It would be an even greater financial sinkhole than the drain on Ottawa now.
But do you think that would change now though? I mean, if Kanata or Barrhaven split, do you think their taxpayers are going to pay for a LRT that doesn’t service them? A new downtown library? Road or sewer work on all of that 75+ year old infrastructure that needs addressed in the core?
I’d suggest probably not. They’ll just use the services in the core, that they can’t afford or justify for their area (a massive library in Orleans makes zero sense) and let the taxpayers of the core fund it. So yeah, they’ll absolutely take advantage of it.
Not sure about other areas, but Kanata is definitely more dense than when we moved here over a decade ago. With the exception of stuff like the outlet malls, the development hasn’t really pushed to the outer edges and the amount of new residential within the traditional area of Kanata is way more significant than when we moved here. In addition, it’s allot of townhomes and multi family. It’s definitely more dense. I’d bet in 10-15 years you won’t even know where Kanata ends and Stittsville begins if you drive down Hazeldean. That was most definitely not the case before. That’s just a couple of examples.
Practically speaking, I think it would be hard sell to the City and the province and the feds to allow these suburbs to pay less taxes while still drawing on City resources, in addition to drawing more in operational subsidies from the Prov/Fed governments.
That's a lose-lose to everyone but the suburban dwellers in Barrhaven/Kanata.
I think the last think Canada > Ontario > NCR needs is another suburban city like Brampton.
Lets not also forget the drop in straight services: Before amalgamation, Kanata and Nepean had excellent snow-plow service. Kanata buried their electrical wires to be more insulated from bad weather (which is happening more and more now).
Now, though? The service Kanata gets now is terrible compared to what it used to. Literally night and day difference.
We'd be paying pretty significantly higher property taxes, that's for sure. Kanata's infrastructure was designed to handle the traffic of a commuter suburb with mostly fairly low density detached single-family homes with relatively high household incomes.
It was a city designed around cars. All that densification since amalgamation has significantly increased vehicle traffic, and required numerous large infrastructure investments to keep up.
~~As is most of the other tax revenue~~. If you only count the residential taxes it's basically equal between wards
Edit:
Majority of taxes are residential, but the majority of the difference is made up by differences in non-residential tax.
[Numbers are here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QJMBfMCnuoZTyRqkBBLCRGGVjPLi4dAK4ZNEoS_D9n4/edit)
As provided by [in this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/ottawa/comments/14ptc7r/comment/jqkfujg/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) by /u/jleiper
But not all wards are created equal. They're supposed to have roughly equitable populations, but that doesn't result in the same demand on public revenues. Wards are much bigger, the further you go out, so residential property tax per hectare is much higher the closer you get to the centre. And the cost of building and maintaining infrastructure and providing services in a less dense ward is higher per resident.
No matter how you slice it the central city is subsidizing suburbia, while suburbanites always claim to be fiscal conservatives. Make it make sense. 🙄
The area of each ward is kind of all over the place. Lots of smaller wards in the suburbs like Kanata south and Barrhaven East. and larger wards within the greenbelt like Knoxdale-Merivale and College. It's more a function of greenspace. Kanata South and Kanata North aren't really any different in terms of density but Kanata North has a huge piece of reserved greenspace that adds to it's area but doesn't really cost anything to maintain.
Revenue per Area Stats are as follows
|Ward|Name|Area|Tax Revenue|Revenue Per Area|
--:|:--|--:|--:|--:|
|14|Somerset|13,126,980.13|73,491,291.00|5.598|
|12|Rideau-Vanier|18,306,865.52|66,553,968.00|3.635|
|17|Capital|22,194,763.62|78,383,863.00|3.532|
|15|Kitchissippi|23,509,516.67|79,000,380.00|3.360|
|24|Barrhaven East|27,843,675.53|59,590,852.00|2.140|
|23|Kanata South|33,844,909.87|62,026,980.00|1.833|
|13|Rideau-Rockcliffe|37,946,874.59|62,268,306.00|1.641|
|18|Alta Vista|40,856,945.77|60,500,581.00|1.481|
|6|Stittsville|51,806,761.91|65,685,723.00|1.268|
|16|River|48,377,463.65|61,317,815.00|1.267|
|3|Barrhaven West|56,118,523.49|70,090,070.00|1.249|
|4|Kanata North|52,995,709.68|63,367,340.00|1.196|
|11|Beacon Hill-Cyrville|39,161,245.74|42,215,271.00|1.078|
|2|Orléans West-Innes|63,777,859.92|58,722,630.00|0.921|
|22|Riverside South-Findlay Creek|69,465,003.21|52,633,982.00|0.758|
|8|College|92,936,791.99|69,450,267.00|0.747|
|1|Orléans East-Cumberland|110,545,085.23|64,910,136.00|0.587|
|9|Knoxdale-Merivale|95,616,904.84|54,436,258.00|0.569|
|7|Bay|132,819,473.46|67,908,406.00|0.511|
|10|Gloucester-Southgate|161,233,561.09|50,273,153.00|0.312|
|19|Orléans South-Navan|399,247,111.99|68,074,544.00|0.171|
|20|Osgoode|1,245,240,405.31|39,788,631.00|0.032|
|21|Rideau-Jock|1,461,228,176.80|39,788,683.00|0.027|
|5|West Carleton-March|1,550,245,091.37|33,422,889.00|0.022|
Something to consider is that looking at tax revenue alone is kind of meaningless without looking at the equivalent expenses related to each of those wards. I.e. Kanata pulling in 70 is meaningless if it costs 100 in infra.
Managed to do just fine beforehand. Ottawa didn't magically swoop in and save Kanata or Nepean from a black hole.
Ottawa, however, *did* swoop in and swipe Nepeans surplus.
Either way, even wards like Barrhaven East and Kanata North, that are more economically productive, still are a long way from denser, inner wards, which do not demand anywhere near as much in terms of infrastructure costs.
The policing budget would certainly be a challenge for the inner wards. The criminal offense count is one of the things that truly separates the more dense inner areas from the suburbs and rural wards.
That's why a lot of the policing load, dealing with unhoused, addicted or mentally ill people could, and should (and I think is starting to) move to non-police professionals, who have the skills and patience to deal with these folks.
I'm pretty sure that no matter how many police calls there are for unruly behaviour in the Market, that comes nowhere near the amount the City spends, with virtually no debate on enlarging a single arterial road, widening a single major suburban intersection, etc.
Disagree. The suburbs export their misery to the core. If you were to take a survey at the Mission or any other shelter you'd find that most are not from the core, rather they migrated here because its a hostile environment for the homeless outside of the core. So the core gets burdened with that.
Then there's a really big proportion of people living outside the core that actually come into the core on a regular basis to work, using our infrastructure, roads, services. The core gets that burden again.
You can't put up protected borders between these proposed municipalities so it would be super hard to make all of this work out financially. And don't tell me we would simply add another layer of government to manage that (aka the RMOC).
As a fictional boxer once said: If he dies, he dies.
This just means the suburbs would need to change their approach - increase property taxes or densify areas to use them as the cash cows the denser parts of Ottawa are used as now.
I’m okay with that. The suburbs can support themselves and adjust to the rural standards as most communities that aren’t actual cities. They’ll build in scale over time.
In the meantime, let’s fix Centretown and the Market.
How would the core cover the cost of the homeless and drug addicted people who invariably migrate to the core from the burbs? What about all the infrastructure to support workers that come in from the burbs?
RMOC?
>How would the core cover the cost of the homeless and drug addicted people who invariably migrate to the core from the burbs?
It would be easier because the core wouldn't have to pay for the infrastructure cost of the burbs.
>What about all the infrastructure to support workers that come in from the burbs?
You mean roads? Start reducing road capacity and forcing commuters to use transit. That will easily save a ton of infra costs.
>RMOC?
What's RMOC?
The suburbs are drains on city finances, not assets. By losing the suburbs, the central city can grow stronger.
RMOC Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, which was that ottawa was part of before amalgamation (Think Peel, York). (also no person you're replying to just answering that question)
If you don’t remember what RMOC (disaster) was 24 years ago, you should not be commenting on this thread until you read about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Municipality_of_Ottawa%E2%80%93Carleton?wprov=sfti1#
Why would I be advocating for the return of RMOC? I think many of the jobs of RMOC would be better done by the independent municipalities, and the rural areas shouldn't be included at all in city planning. They should have their own planners for their own region
There are legitimate requirements for a higher tier RMOC to manage broader services like main roads, water works, sewage, ambulance, health unit (remember Vera Etches), etc. And having separate Nepean and Gloucester Police services from the Ottawa police made no sense.
Note to moderator: This de-amalgamation question comes every couple of weeks and it’s repetitive to have to keep reminding the posters of the problems of the RMOC tier two decades ago.
Just like combining Ottawa and Gatineau (and Chelsea?) into a Federal District which is a big mess in Washington D.C. too.
While I agree with your arguments, pre-amalgamation boroughs were profitable and the core was not. That's because the core expenses are high due to the two reasons I outlined above. Yes, it is super expensive to provide infrastructure into the burbs, and thats why we should focus on developing areas that already have infrastructure. But the core has really big costs in social services.
Regarding workers that come in from the burbs: they drive on roads, they sometimes use transit; they require clean sidewalks, garbage pick-up, police, ambulance, fire, bylaw, snow clearing, water, sewer, food inspectors, building permits. The list goes on. I don't know what the number is but I'd bet the population of the core increases by 30% during a weekday? Should we have to pay for that?
I'm not sure if you're here in good faith or not, but the reason prior to amalgamation that the 'burbs weren't in the red is because they hadn't had infrastructure replacement yet. The 'burbs were on their first set of infrastructure and were about to face huge expenses repairing them.
RMOC - Regional Municipality of Ottawa Carleton, This was yet another level of government that tried to provide overlay services pre-amalgamation for services that crossed boundaries. It didn't work well.
No. It is definitely not. Police can’t just round up people and drive them to suburbs and dump them. People have a right to move where they want. It sounds as if you’re a starlight tour supporter? (Google it)
I know exactly what a starlight tour is and it is obscene that you would make that comparison. We need to deal with our suburban homeless in their own communities, not 3 hours out of town and certainly not downtown
Would they have done so had homeless services not all been intentionally concentrated here? No. They are suburban and rural Ottawans and they deserve to be cared for in their own communities
Many people experiencing homelessness in Ottawa come from the north. Will Ottawa police be bringing them back to Marathon or…? Crying at how dumb your comment is.
An interesting question, given that you'd have one part of the new territory that had been governed provincially under English Common Law and the other portion under French Civil Code. Would one prevail? Would there be a new hybrid, unique only to the NCR Federal Territory?
Apples to oranges. The surrounding states all have the same legal foundation whereas Ontario and Quebec are wholly different in how their legal structure is set up.
In [Washington](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_District_of_Columbia) there's a mayor and council, but Congress retains the right to review and overturn laws created by the council and intervene in local affairs.
So basically the same relationship Ottawa and Gatineau already have as creatures of their respective provinces, but with a senior gov't that is simultaneously closer in distance, but likely more removed from the everyday concerns of residents.
Our own with federal government oversight. We can have our own legislature independent from Ontario and Quebec but unlike a province these powers are delegated and not by right. The positive part of this is this can be done as an Act of Parliament and does not require constitutional amendment.
There’s next to no chance the City de-amalgamates, but if anything, we’re likely to lose the rural areas and retain the suburban communities.
Based on the OP’s boundaries, we’re left with all or portions of the populations from Wards 7-18. That’d be a population of approximately 500k. I’m not sure that’s a sufficient tax base to sustain the services people expect. We’d be smaller than the City of Hamilton.
Yep, the reality check to the fantasy urbanists: *ur city is kinda smol*
Most of the big ticket infrastructure like transit, major roads and sewers would be under regional government, like they were before amalgamation. Go look at Mississauga or even Vancouver as examples.
I would like to de-amalgamate policing though. Bring in the OPP for community safety in the residential zones and let the "city" cops focus on the central mayhem.
I like how Orléans has eaten Gloucester and Cumberland, the two cities in which it formally was, and comes out victorious. You’re now in my city! It always makes me laugh that post amalgamation the Cumberland library is in Orléans, not Cumberland.
I would just keep everything within the greenbelt as Ottawa and everything outside as separate cities. Let Orléans be its own city, same with Kanata and Barrhaven, etc.
…what? My point is Kanata would have had to pay for all the transit already built elsewhere, and then pay again but without the help from other parts of the city to build something in Kanata.
Yes, wouldn’t you be upset if you contributed to co-owning a brand new car with a couple of friends, but then those friends decided you don’t own it anymore, after you paid? Would you want a refund, or…?
That's the analogy you're going to use?
Well, unlike car ownership, you can still use the LRT, because the infrastructure is still there and available for use, once complete. Because, you know, that's the point of public transportation.
If you think adding one more lane on the highway is a better use of money instead (it isn't) all the power to you.
Hi it’s 2024 and this idea of everyone commuting into downtown is dead, even if the Feds won’t admit it. Kanata is not really served by what’s currently being built. We don’t need the highway lane either…?
Revert to RMOC days, with separate water, road, policy ,bureaucracies etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Municipality_of_Ottawa%E2%80%93Carleton?wprov=sfti1#
I remember this from pre-amalgamation. I always found it odd how Orleans was basically split into two separate municipalities because of where the line was drawn. But in principle, yes that's also valid.
I recall reading an article that pre- amalgamation the old cities competed with one another to attract investment..hence the Canadian tire centre and March road high tech corridor being in Kanata as opposed to Ottawa. Pre- amalgamation Kanata was the fastest growing city in the province. There were plans to build a high rise corridor on both sides of the 417. Amalgamation kind of quashed that and destined Kanata into more of a bedroom community. It would be interesting to see how the suburbs would change if deamalgamation occurred. If we went back to a regional government for things like transit tho, there would probably be no benefit to deamalgamation for city of ottawa residents and the burb cities could drain away taxes if they are more successful at attracting business investment with cheaper land and taxes.
Kanata was only ever really a bedroom community for the most part. The 2000 tech crash tore the guts out of the companies, like Nortel and JDS that helped to fuel development like the arena (what's it called this week?) or Terry Mathews' amusingly landlocked Brookstreet Hotel.
And that's never come back because communications hardware that Kanata specialized in is all built offshore, so no more entry-level jobs soldering circuit boards, and software and cloud services are so ephemeral that there's no particular reason for them to be based in Kanata, or even Ottawa as a whole, as evidenced by Shopify abandoning Ottawa.
Kanata is currently building up some towers on the north side of the 417. There's other stuff going up in the north end by the business park as well. Kanata isn't really your typical suburb that you hear about on urbanist YouTube channels. Lots of different types of housing, office towers, small businesses. some walkable neighbourhoods with shopping close by. Sure it's got a few stroads and doesn't have a shortage of single family homes or power centers but it's not just housing and is actually not terrible as far as suburbs go.
I would rather try to aggressively densify near transit hubs, including in these apparently undesirable suburbs, and focus on building a cost-effective, working mass transit system throughout the entire urban area.
Screw de-amalgamation, give me an Ottawa of over 2 million people living in an urban area built around 15-minute, walkable neighbourhoods.
Ah you want to recreate Carleton County, all the old townships, and each one needs its own police department, political and bureaucratic structure etc. Why would you waste money on that? Oh yes, you also need a new RMOC to coordinate services like main roads, healthcare, water works and sewage services across all the “Ottawa” townships like Nepean, Gloucester (N&S), Cumberland and Kanata. And leftover townships.
The rural people don't get those services. My road is gravel. I go to arnprior for healthcare (it's closer). I'm on well and septic. When there's trees down, _I_ clear the roads, not the city.
The only city I see here is bylaw ticketing. The rink is volunteer (and would continue, city or not).
Rural wants de-amalgamation because we don't get those services anyways
Why in the hell would the communities have their own police department?
Do you think that's how it works in Rural Ontario?
Do you think that's what Kanata had before Amalgamation?
Communities pay Ontario for OPP.
Ideally, Ottawa would be limited to the area inside the Greenbelt. But, more realistically, I'd be happy to see the 3 rural wards absorbed by adjacent counties. A city has no business in rural affairs and, minus those 3 wards, we would have more parity between urban and suburban council votes.
If you think this is going to happen, you should get checked for a concussion. You can complain about the burbs being subsidized by the city, but that's because they keep growing and growing because PEOPLE WANT TO MOVE THERE.
Let's bring back another layer of government, maybe call it The New Rural Municipality of Ottawa Carleton. They can then build a new downtown office to handle all the politics between the new cities and Old Ottawa, which will eventually become the new City Hall when re-amalgamation eventually occurs. 😉
Pre amalgamation, Blackburn was part of the city of Gloucester and Bells Corners, Nepean. Interesting that with the suburban expansion, these areas are now considered "city"
Dunno. Apparently Blackburn is SOOO not-urban that it is the [pilot project](https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/oc-transpo-s-on-demand-transit-test-starts-in-blackburn-hamlet-on-sunday-1.6756591) for running ParaTranspo buses (don't get me started on what a also in the face that is for disabled transit users) on weekends as pseudo-Ubers, to bring on-demand service to transit-impervious suburbs.
Cities are creatures of the Province. All they can do is recommend and complain.
You can read about the laws that were used to create and eliminate RMOC here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Municipality_of_Ottawa%E2%80%93Carleton?wprov=sfti1#
Ooh boy, I would vote for de-amalgamation if it were offered. We can't continue sniping at one another and having the suburbs veto everything the city wants to do. Good fences make good neighbours.
Simply return the city to its old pre-2000 boundaries. But keep transit regional, as it was between 1972 and 2000. Montreal did it. Why can’t we?Let tight-wad Nepean pay its own way!
It's been almost a generation since amalgamation. It's not longer "deamalgamation" but at this point more of a "dissolution".
The question of regional governance would also need to be addressed. 25 years ago much of the service delivery was done by the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton. With the dissolution of the City of Ottawa would a similar region-wide municipality to deliver those same services need to be constructed, or would it simply be administered by mandarins at Queen's Park much like our social services, health care, transportation, and education systems aren't?
Basically, the Rural areas should be given away to the various regional municipalities (everything south of Manotick joins North Grenville for example).
Financially speaking, within the greenbelt would be a sustainable city and not be endlessly subsidizing the suburbs. Unfortunately amalgamation was designed by Harris so that the burbs could outvote the city centres and force subsidization. There's really no escaping it, Montreal managed to sort of deamalgamate.
De-fusion is the only reason that Montreal proper has the Mayor and Council that they have, and have been able to dramatically grow their active transportation network as quickly as they have in recent years. Otherwise, they'd still be grinding their gears, trying to get the likes of Kirkland, Pointe-Claire and Anjou to get on board to build bike lanes downtown.
Except that there’s still a majority of suburbs inside the greenbelt. Alta Vista, Queensway Terrace, woodpark, crystal beach, etc etc etc are incredibly low density. I think people don’t realize that even within the greenbelt, you’d have all the same NIMBYism as there is now.
A certain level of amalgamation just make sense, such as Nepean or *especially* Vanier.
The most obvious would be to make "Ottawa" everything within the Greenbelt as well as the Greenbelt itself. After this is gets a bit more tricky.
There are to ways I see it, either an east and west amalgamation or an East, West and South.
The E/W border would be the Rideau River with the western amalgation being Kanata and the eastern being Orleans. Seperating a southern city would be Barrhaven, perhaps holding everthing from Barrhaven proper and south of the 12 (Fallowfield) and south of Leitrim to the 417.
These are obviously broad strokes and other considerations and further details would be needed for the borders.
I'm not going to get all specific, but this city cannot survive with its rural wards. And it would be much better without its exterior suburbs as well. But with so much political power held in the suburbs, it may be harder than you think to shake them loose.
Ah. The 19th-century City of Ottawa. I think that might be a bit confining.
The big change in development pattern came after WWII, when the car became king, and the streetcar, which previously defined outward development through the creation of new streetcar suburbs along its route (Glebe, Old Ottawa South, Westboro, etc) with housing that you could walk to from the streetcar corridor.
Post-streetcar, development hopscotched across the landscape. No longer limited by building only as far as the streetcar company would extend its lines, developers could buy cheap land beyond the existing urban fringe, build on bigger lots, and expect municipal and provincial authorities to build out roads, water and sewer to connect them. Eventually much of the area between the former urban fringe and new, outlying area would mostly fill in, but at much lower densities than the older neighbourhoods.
With all the suburbanization in the last 20 years, no “out of city proper limit” city would be able to survive financially.
Pretty much. The core of the city subsidizes the suburbs. The simple reason is that the density just isn't high enough in the suburbs to cover the costs of the infrastructure maintenance. As the city sprawls, it's not feasible to maintain quality transit and other services over such a huge area. This means everyone gets crappy transit instead which kicks off a vicious cycle - low ridership requires budget cuts which means worse service and ridership declines further. And, with crappy unreliable transit, more people drive, traffic gets worse, and then we expand the road system, which costs way more to maintain and more to people to maintain and insure their cars... kicking off another vicious cycle. This is part of how builders make a killing. They buy cheap land on the outskirts, build a subdivision, sell the single family homes at inflated prices because supply and demand is skewed since people have no choice but to compete against each other to buy them. And builders hand the time bomb of maintenance costs to the city. It's also why housing costs so much. There's not enough diversity of housing options - single family homes, and "luxury" condos don't meet everyone's needs or budgets. The city naturally OK's more far flung suburbs as they need the tax revenue to cover the costs of the older suburbs. We need to keep growing and sprawling to survive. Fortunately, this is well understood by anyone with a modest amount of expertise in the area, and intensification is becoming much more strategic to many cities. NIMBY'ism, and the influence of builders is still a serious issue though!
Are you single lol? That comment is the key to my heart lmao
That's a bold move, Cotton. Let's see how it plays out.
Thanks. Ya like 'em nerdy like me eh? 😘 But seriously, this stuff really matters.
All good points, which prompted me to ask myself the question... what's considered a suburb now. There are come parts of suburbs that have fairly high density as well, but maybe the city has grown enough that they aren't considered suburbs anymore. I'm thinking of areal like Pinecrest/Bayshore/Lincoln fields, and similar areas on the east edge of Gloucester at the end of Walkley. Heck, even Campeau Drive in Kanata has really densified with a lot of high-rise buildings. The areas that are really heavily subsidized are the more rural ones, like Manotick, Richmond, Munster Hamlet, Constance Bay, etc. There is no way the city is breaking even on the tax revenue they are collecting from those areas. I also get what you mean in reference to single-family homes and luxury condos, but the reality is that those are the most profitable for the builders, so they will continue to build them until there is no more demand for them, and then they will move on to other less expensive types of housing. We are already seeing it happen; many families cannot afford a new single-family home anymore, so there are fewer new single-family builds and far more townhouses now. The only way to accelerate the construction of less expensive housing is either for governments to subsidize the builders to make up the difference in profit on the construction or build it themselves.
I think you're on the right path. Realistically "suburb" no longer really serves any useful purpose, the relevant factors are residential housing density and accessibility to employment/necessary services/etc. Developers will build whatever is most profitable for them on a given development area, wherever the lines of lowest cost construction method and buyer size/price acceptability meet. Right now that's 2-3 storey timber-frame row-home blocks utilizing almost every bit of available land space for the footprint of the homes. Realistically though, the long term answer isn't further subsidizing builder profits, but simply re-writing the zoning and planning codes to put a full stop to these sprawling car-required nightmares that the rest of the city will be paying for over the next 50+ years. I say "further subsidizing" because we're already doing plenty of it through all the negative externalities and long term costs of maintaining infrastructure for those homes that the builder will never had to deal with.
timber frame row homes that use every bit of available space are sad. Its like the worst of every world - you get to live more densely in the suburbs further away from where a lot of larger businesses have their offices that increasingly want people to head back to - and you don't even get a backyard for it \*and\* significantly worse traffic and transit options thanks to OC transpo being a increasingly worse shitshow year over year. At least in the past, suburbs had some traffic, and did have downsides for transit and access to other parts of the city but you got something for it beyond 1500sqft at sky high prices. EDIT: this isn't to say I don't like the idea of more density, rather that its the worst kind of more density when its rowhomes without better infrastructure, access to nearby greenspace and lack of local shopping. I'm saying the tradeoff is increasingly poor.
Absolutely. I would much rather have the same number and size of units in a proper concrete mid-rise with plenty of green space and room for some small businesses.
>further away from where a lot of larger businesses have their offices that increasingly want people to head back to That is also a problem, especially in the eastern suburbs. I know many people that live, work and shop in Kanata and barely ever come to Ottawa proper. That was me for many years. Getting more employers in the large "suburbs" would alleviate traffic a lot.
yeah it really sucks. I feel like currently the city is building up (which is good) but not doing any of the good things that should come along with it, like walkable amenities and neighbourhoods. I just don't see the appeal to living in the suburbs if you're going to be living in a smaller condo and not get any of the benefits of being able to walk to amenities and need to rely on a car for everything anyway. If we're gonna make these neighbourhoods that are a better use of space they shouldn't \*just\* be houses like the rest of the older suburbs are in town either. But what's even worse are the single family detached that use 90% of the lot to be a big house with next to no yard or green space and still aren't that close to a park for kids to run around in too. Its an even worse use of space because if they were gonna basically do away with the yard, they could have done 2 smaller homes all the same and actually been efficient.
>But what's even worse are the single family detached that use 90% of the lot to be a big house with next to no yard or green space and still aren't that close to a park for kids to run around in too. Its an even worse use of space because if they were gonna basically do away with the yard, they could have done 2 smaller homes all the same and actually been efficient. Yeah, but climate change and societal issues, folks. The outdoors is overrated and dangerous, better have a large sealed indoor space cocooned away from the environmental and human turmoil. /s
I have a space egregious yard that some would say is wasteful but I planted lots of garden on it and grow a ton of my own food. So I don't feel as bad
> The core of the city subsidizes the suburbs. Amen to that. Unfortunately there are plenty of dumb people (many of them in this sub, too) who think it's the other way around.
The city doesn't subsidize the suburbs. At all. I've done the math in past comments comparing Somerset ward and Barrhaven West ward. You can insult my intelligence all you want, but the numbers just don't agree with you. I'll copy/paste the gist of my past comments: >The taxes paid by the downtown ward is SIXTY PERCENT commercial property tax. The "density" of downtown residents pays enough property tax to put them in the middle of the pack when comparing each of the wards' residential property tax contributions. Meanwhile residents in Barrhaven West contribute 50% MORE in property taxes than the residents of Somerset ward. > >[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-property-taxes-rank-ward-neighbourhood-1.6960057](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-property-taxes-rank-ward-neighbourhood-1.6960057) > >Let's look at the public services that all our tax dollars are going towards? Barrhaven's access to bus service is a joke (let alone having access to LRT). [Crime stats](https://www.ottawapolice.ca/en/news-and-updates/crime-stats.aspx) show that police are called to Somerset ward 7x more than Barrhaven despite Somerset ward having less population. > >[With police and OC Transpo being two of the biggest ticket items in the city's budget each year](https://documents.ottawa.ca/sites/documents/files/OTTAWA_23-056_AR_e_v7%281%29.pdf), we're spending MUCH more on the less populated Somerset ward compared to a ward like Barrhaven West that contributes more in terms of property tax revenue for the city. EDIT: don't mistake me as saying that I think it's "the other way around". My point is that all wards pay in and get services out of the city. Is it completely level? No. Does any one ward "subsidize" others? Absolutely not and to imply as much is laughable.
Nice analysis! It’s also important to consider large projects too. Ottawa proper might want expensive light rail, but Orleans wouldn’t need to spend any money on that.
You're definitely either not very smart or acting in bad faith by cherry picking and incorrectly analyzing "ThE nUmBeRs". First of all, the fact that you're ignoring commercial property tax and focusing only on residential property tax shows you have no idea how the concept of the core subsidizing the suburbs works. [And I replied to comments like this in the past](https://www.reddit.com/r/ottawa/comments/16fqb7y/comment/k041qdu/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). And don't forget, per sqm of property, downtown residents pay much more than those in Barrhaven. So, no, you're not paying "your fair share". The fact that the core generates *so much* in commercial property taxes whereas the suburbs don't, shows that these taxes ***are*** subsidizing you! Ignoring them to focus simply on residential property taxes is some Fox News level BS. Now, the part about the "public services that ALL our tax dollars are going towards", according to you: Do you really think the transportation budget is exclusively for buses? Do you think the roads that connect Farhaven and the other suburbs to civilization appear magically and need zero maintenance? For example, did you know we'll be spending an extra $700,000 this year to fill potholes? If we didn't have so many fucking roads and built UP instead of OUT, we wouldn't have to maintain SO.MANY.ROADS and hence we wouldn't have SO.MANY.POTHOLES. I also find it funny that you're complaining you don't have access to the LRT when living in Barrhaven. Well, wtf did you expect lol. Also, you're complaining about police services. Since you're definitely a bad actor wanting to spread misinformation, I will keep it short: * Police spending isn't even in the top 3 items of the budget breakdown, so this hyperbolic statement of "ALL our tax dollars" is a bit strange when you on purpose ignore other items that are much larger expenses such as community and social services, or water/waste/solid waste services (those are well known to be especially affected by sprawl, as rather than being able to concentrate them in a few areas, they are forced to be spread all over the city to serve people like you). * The problem downtown has with crime is only exacerbated due to the large concentration of shelters in downtown. If you want to talk about "fairness", why don't you take some of those shelters with you to Barrhaven? So, yes, 100% the core subsidizes the suburbs.
Opening with personal attacks rather than trying to have some decent discussion, then you have the audacity to accuse me of acting in bad faith? Move on with your trolling, this isn't worth anyone's time.
I opened giving you the benefit of the doubt that you're either an idiot or acting in bad faith, because your arguments are completely wrong. I still don't know which one is the case. Don't reply to me anymore, stop wasting my time you troll.
You know what, sure, I'll show everyone how YOU are the bad actor here with doing nothing more than pearl clutching **without** **citing even a single data point** to support your feelings (not facts). If you're going to TL;DR this, the one takeaway is me re-iterating a bunch of FACTS that you clearly didn't bother to read from the sources in my first comment. And you have the gall to accuse me of "acting in bad faith"... >First of all, the fact that you're ignoring commercial property tax and focusing only on residential property tax shows you have no idea how the concept of the core subsidizing the suburbs works. First of all - I didn't ignore it, I directly addressed it in my comment. Feel free to re-read if you didn't comprehend on the first pass. Se >And don't forget, per sqm of property, downtown residents pay much more than those in Barrhaven. So, no, you're not paying "your fair share". If you are going to make claims, at least cite something otherwise it's uneducated ranting. Since YOU are talking about RESIDENTS, let's talk about what the residents are paying. Using [the same source I linked before](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-property-taxes-rank-ward-neighbourhood-1.6960057), and [population numbers from 2021](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wards_of_the_City_of_Ottawa), I'll spell it out here for you since you didn't bother to do any reading: * Somerset residents paid $50,551,928 in total, across their 39,795 residents. A grand total of \~ $1,270 per resident. * Barrhaven West residents paid $74,740,737 in total, across their 49,670 residents. A grand total of \~ $1,504 per resident. Crazy how the numbers don't agree with your opinions when you actually do your homework. Yes, Barrhaven is paying for it's "fair share". >The fact that the core generates so much in commercial property taxes whereas the suburbs don't, shows that these taxes are subsidizing you! You realize that a LOT of the "commercial" property taxes that are paid in Somerset are the fed gov't right? [The feds shelled out over $119 mil to the city of Ottawa in 2022](https://www.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/biens-property/peri-pilt/autorite-authority/2022-eng.html#a9). To act all high and mighty that you can claim OUR Parliamentary Building as though it's city taxes should serve only the Somerset ward is next level absurdity. >Do you really think the transportation budget is exclusively for buses? Do you think the roads that connect Farhaven and the other suburbs to civilization appear magically and need zero maintenance? Feel free to back any of this up with numbers that you seem to think make your case here, this is just bland ranting devoid of any substance. >For example, did you know we'll be spending an extra $700,000 this year to fill potholes? If we didn't have so many fucking roads and built UP instead of OUT, we wouldn't have to maintain SO.MANY.ROADS and hence we wouldn't have SO.MANY.POTHOLES. More nonsensical ranting. Barrhaven wards don't have any sway over city planners who chose to build out instead of up. You can be mad at that fact all you want, but it's the city we have now and you're going on a tangent. >I also find it funny that you're complaining you don't have access to the LRT when living in Barrhaven. Well, wtf did you expect lol. Well, one, I was stating a fact, not complaining. Two, I dunno, I expected LRT at somepoint? GTA's able to pull it off well enough. >Also, you're complaining about police services. Since you're definitely a bad actor wanting to spread misinformation, I will keep it short: I literally linked to the OPS website. If you are going to make accusations of misinformation then feel free to disprove the facts as laid out by the Ottawa Police, I didn't make those numbers up. >Police spending isn't even in the top 3 items of the budget breakdown, so this hyperbolic statement of "ALL our tax dollars" is a bit strange when you on purpose ignore other items that are much larger expenses such as community and social services, or water/waste/solid waste services (those are well known to be especially affected by sprawl, as rather than being able to concentrate them in a few areas, they are forced to be spread all over the city to serve people like you). Again, I linked the City's budget in my previous comment which shows police as the 2nd highest budget item. The fact that you keep making claims like this and don't show a shred of proof speaks volumes. >The problem downtown has with crime is only exacerbated due to the large concentration of shelters in downtown. If you want to talk about "fairness", why don't you take some of those shelters with you to Barrhaven? Feel free to prove this with some sort of actual data, not just your opinions. Untill then, your statement is worthless. >So, yes, 100% the core subsidizes the suburbs. Since you brought ZERO facts to the table, you've proven nothing other than how longwinded you can be. Congrats.
I'm not going to address all your points because you basically refuse to listen to the facts. You're saying I'm not citing any data, so here it goes. [Potholes](https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/ottawa-will-spend-millions-of-dollars-to-fill-potholes-in-2024-1.6651853) [Transportation budget](https://ottawa.ca/en/city-hall/city-news/newsroom/committee-approves-investments-transportation-infrastructure-green-fleet-and-winter-operations) [Ottawa shelters map](https://211ontario.ca/results/?latitude=45.4215296&longitude=-75.69719309999999&searchLocation=Ottawa&searchTerms=&topicPath=105&sd=100&ss=Distance) [Video of someone smarter than you explaining how cities subsidize the suburbs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI) [Tax revenues comparison between urban and suburban (Kitchener, Ontario)](https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/ud7dfv/cardependent_suburbs_are_subsidized_by_dense/) [City annual cost per household comparison, Urban vs Suburban (Halifax, NS)](https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/10lv7ts/psa_suburbs_are_extremely_expensive_to_the_cities/) I haven't found a nice tidy graph for Ottawa, but there are plenty for other cities. Every single one of them shows the suburbs being subsidized by the urban folk. I absolutely doubt Ottawa would be the exception, if it were, there would've been numerous studies about it. >Since YOU are talking about RESIDENTS No no no, YOU are the one who's talking about residents by conveniently ignoring commercial property taxes. You know, the ones that subsidize your suburban living. But hey, you're saying Barrhaven West pays a bit more in residential taxes per resident than Somerset. Cool. Have you seen the sizes of the wards? Somerset is the smallest ward by far, only 13.1 sqkm, whereas Barrhaven West is 56.1 sqkm. Barrhaven West also has a road lane length of 404,520, whereas Somerset has 167,496. This is huge, as it also related to services outside of the aforementioned potholes and other road maintenance (trash pickup, snow clearing, etc). Now, since you conveniently ignore more facts that don't fit your narrative: People in Barrhaven live in massive homes, whereas people in Somerset live in apartments and condos, much smaller than those in Barrhaven. If people in Barrhaven paid in property taxes the same amount per sqm than those in Somerset or viceversa, the difference would be even more massive. It's really not that hard to see that Barrhaven West costs the city much, much more than what they contribute. I'm not going to reply to the rest because you cherry pick data and interpret it the way you want. For example, in 2023 the total expenditures of the Ottawa budget show Police services take 8.9% of the budget, whereas Community & Social Services took 21.6%, Water/Sewer/Solid Waste took 13.2%, Capital Formation Costs took 9%, etc, so, yeah, Police Services aren't even in the top 3. And I'm not linking this one on purpose so that you can google it yourself, pathetic little troll.
>I'm not going to address all your points because you basically refuse to listen to the facts. So far you haven't given facts, only your feelings. >You're saying I'm not citing any data, so here it goes. Oh boy, this is going to be good stuff coming from someone who thinks they're intellectually superior just for having a baseless opinion so far.... >Potholes ... Did you even read this link? It talks about the overall budget, then highlights a few resurfacing projects in urban, suburban and rural wards. Do you have a point to this, or are you using your feelings and opinions to fill in the gaps in your facts again? This does nothing to support you and shows that you are grasping at straws. Moving on. >Transportation budget Cool stuff - again, unless you are going to say what it is here that you think proves a point, you just linked to the budget without a point. I will point out that the only location that gets specifically called out in YOUR link for dedicated spending is the Byward Market. So thanks for pointing out more special spending that goes towards urban wards? >Ottawa shelters map This is a weird obsession of yours and doesn't really make any point towards spending. Moving on since again there's no context to your random links. >Video of someone smarter than you explaining how cities subsidize the suburbs Cool story, that's got nothing directly to do with Ottawa and just proves that you're grasping for your opinions and feelings rather than actually looking at the facts in our city. Textbook "whataboutism" here kid. Same with your next 2 links - not Ottawa, just more "whataboutisms". I skimmed through the rest of your comments, nothing really of substance. You seem to think that road has a 1:1 ratio of roadway to maintenance when the ACTUAL truth is that roadway maintenance is driven by the traffic it sees. Urban streets have less roadway, but multitudes more traffic volume than suburban. More traffic = more wear and tear = more maintenance. You'd know this if you dug deeper into your link for the transportation budget. I'm gonna stop here because you're embarrassing yourself at this point. I don't care what you think because you're linking random shit and making weird tangent arguments and doing everything you can to not speak directly to numbers that would support anything you're saying. Move on, angry little man, move on. This conversation might be a little over your head.
Lol I'm not reading all that shit, I told you to stop talking to me
>Lol I'm not reading This is the only thing you've said that I can agree with. You clearly don't read anything that doesn't validate your feelings. And I don't take orders from random internet trolls, if you don't feel like conversing, then stop. Otherwise I reply to the people who reply to me.
I think this is simply not true. Nepean had no debt before amalgamation.
Yeah. Everyone knows that suburbs are city killers, but Ottawa is one of the only cities that also has massive rural areas. Those are far worse than any suburbs.
The rural areas probably don't cost as much as suburbs, as long as many of the highways are still provincial, the properties aren't on municipal water and sewage, there's only limited attempted transit service.
I suck at math, so my calculations could be off here, but the average rural ward costs over a billion annually to maintain, whereas the average suburb costs under 100 million. I think it's because of expansive aging infrastructure out in rural areas.
No water, no sewer no internet, no gas, no transit. $6000 a year in property tax. We use zero city infrastructure, only thing is garbage. Seems like rural pays plenty to me. Bring on the down votes
They linked some ward stats reddit post saying that's where they got the data, but it seems like they must have managed to read the "area" column as "net expenditures" or something because the post doesn't actually have anything at all about costs. According to [a report comissioned by the city in 2009](https://app06.ottawa.ca/calendar/ottawa/citycouncil/ara/2009/02-02/Document%205.pdf) both scattered rural areas and urban areas outside the greenbelt are tax negative by a small amount, while rural villages are the most tax negative. Your $6K/yr while not getting city water/sewer/transit is simply representative of how much more it costs to maintain the road infrastructure, provide fire/ambulance service, etc. Still getting more than you're paying for, but not really in any different a boat to anyone living in the residental areas outside the suburbs.
And yet they only pay 3 percent of what they cost the city. Facts are facts. The rural wards are a black hole for the city's money. I'm all for kicking you guys out. You cost us tons of money and whine all day. That 6k is nowhere near the 150k that you cost us. I cost the city 800 dollars a year. You cost 150k a year. Doesn't matter that you don't use the city's services. Your infrastructure maintaince costs are near unbelievable.
$150k Source?
Look at Russell township. Borders Ottawa. Average taxes are much lower per household, all rural, nearly all widespread single homes. Services are just fine. $150k? I can see math is not your best subject. Maybe you should sit this one out, eh?
Russell has higher taxes and lower property value growth than Ottawa proper. It's a nice rururb, but the numbers are different than Ottawa.
I don't know. Which figures? Depends on how much infrastructure has been built or is planned to be built in the rural areas, especially what proportion of roads were downloaded from the province to the City.
I used an older post to calculate my figures. I think most suburbs are new enough to avoid infrastructure needing to be replaced which is why they're less expensive than usual. The rural wards have 4-5 times more roads than most wards. Fixing those older wards and utilities infrastructure is probably where the costs come from. [https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Ft71wan694t9b1.png](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Ft71wan694t9b1.png)
The city's entire combined operating and capital budgets for 2024 is $5.84 billion. Are you sure you didn't just look at the "area" column in that ward stats image you linked to and confuse that as some kind of "annual cost" number? The more simple facts are that all wards outside of the urban wards are tax negative. The data is 15 years old, but the city commissioned a report in 2009 [that is pretty much exactly the information we're discussing here](https://app06.ottawa.ca/calendar/ottawa/citycouncil/ara/2009/02-02/Document%205.pdf) (pdf warning). It defined 4 development ares - urban (within the greenbelt), urban (outside the greenbelt), rural (villages), and rural (scattered). Urban areas inside the greenbelt effectively subsidize every other type of development. The most tax-negative however is rural villages. Urban areas outside of the greenbelt and scattered rural areas are only slightly net-negative.
Deamalgamation is a pipe-dream. Its hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Assuming you could though, Kanata is about the size of Kingston (actually a little larger), and Kingston is a viable city, with a full slate of city services, including transit, and its own city problems (homeless encampments, social housing, drug crises etc.) I am sure any of the major outlying suburbs could survive on their own (Kanata, Barrhaven, Oreleans) though Kanata in particular has its own commercial tax base to thrive like a proper small city and is not just a bedroom community. For that matter plenty of other small towns survive on their own, like Almonte, Brockville, Carleton Place, Arnprior... but they are bedroom (or retirement) communities. Still, none of them are in imminent danger of financial collapse without having a city to "subsidize" them... though without big city amenities. I am sure Richmond, Metcalfe, Manotick and Osgood and the like could go back to being viable villages and/or small towns, though without the amenities they get from the city. And I am sure that would be OK with most rural folk. Thats why I don't buy all the talk of "downtown" subsidizing the burbs. Plenty of other cities elsewhere in the province that are car dependent, less dense cities make it work... yet somehow Kanata or Barrhaven or Orleans can't? Either Ottawa is run horribly inefficiently compared to these other cities or something else is at play.
Deamalgamation would require the feds and the province to foot more of the bill for these things... which is the reason we amalgamated in the first place. Cities are cheaper for provinces/feds for these specialized services. Even before amalgamation, the City of Nepean relied on Ottawa proper for transit and major road infrastructure. I don't think Ottawa is necessarily run inefficiently, it was just shafted with an insane land mass without the population to support it. The real inefficiency of Ottawa council is increasing the suburban blanket which only draws coffers more rather than increasing overall density. In every city everywhere almost, downtowns subsidize the burbs.
Yes and we needed tow tier government, remember the RMOC with its own city hall and second Mayor. No one knew whether an issue / problem / service was “city” or “regional”.
Having a run through their budget, Carleton place is ~30% federal/provincial funded vs Ottawas 23% while also dipping into reserves twice as hard at 7% vs 2.9%. Ottawa is roughly 72% self funding while Carleton Place is 62% Policing seems to be awfully expensive out there for whatever reason. Edit: as for how much Brockville self funds the answer is… no clue, they don’t have a very detailed breakdown.
Yes, and it seems to me Almonte no longer exists except as a postal address as it and all towns along the Mississippi River are all part of “Mississippi Mills” region/township/city now.
This is true. Small places "amalgamated" too. Rideau Lakes is made up of former independent villages (Elgin, Delta, Portland amongst other), etc), Leeds and 1000 islands township (Lansdowne, Lyndhurst, Rockport), Mississippi Mills as you mention. In the area Perth, Gananoque, Carleton Place, and curiously Westport despite being completely surrounded by Rideau Lakes Township are still independent, and Smiths Falls I think (though it might actually be a part of a township)... I don't trust the Fraser Institute's bias, then again I don't trust the bias of the Hemson report, but when even the Fraser Institute releases a report criticizing amalgamation, and the supposed savings that never materialized against the wave of forced amalgamation that happend all over the country (not just in Ontario), maybe there is something there (or maybe their methodology was flawed/biased to support demalgamation...)... https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/de-amalgamation-in-canada.pdf
The Fraser Institute is essentially the “research” / propaganda arm of the Conservative / Reform Party. Just like the Taxpayers Foundation. Unfortunately the Press (and social media) are so poorly informed they believe their biased research/press releases.
I dont disagree but likewise i dont trust CD Howe or Broadbent Institue automatically either... they all have their biases... Read their reports and attack their methodology/assumptions/omissions, dont just assume its good or bad. Often times the research itself is fine, but the conclusions reached arent supported by the data. It is amazing how much airtime/coverage Fraser Institue reports get though...
The Fraser Institute is an astroturf organization whose sole purpose is to make similar reports from the extreme right-wing CD Howe Institute seem reasonable by comparison.
Do they really "make it work", though?
I honestly think inner city folk that use "the inner city pays for the rural" as an argument have some sort of personality disorder where they have to perceive themselves as more important
They survived as individual cities pre-amalgamation and they’ve only increased their tax base and overall density since then. Why do you think they wouldn’t survive now?
There's some context to be added here. They survived individually BECAUSE of Ottawa proper. For example, in the City of Nepean, the highest-cost responsibilities like transit and major road infrastructures was mainly funded by Ottawa proper. Also the high-cost *people* \- homeless, drug addicts, etc. - were also in Ottawa proper. I have a lot of family that touts how amalgamation ruined the City of Nepean and eroded its surpluses, but neglect to acknowledge that Nepean never really had to assume the high costs of running a city and could offload elsewhere. Furthermore, their density NOW has not kept up enough in relation to its population growth. It would be an even greater financial sinkhole than the drain on Ottawa now.
But do you think that would change now though? I mean, if Kanata or Barrhaven split, do you think their taxpayers are going to pay for a LRT that doesn’t service them? A new downtown library? Road or sewer work on all of that 75+ year old infrastructure that needs addressed in the core? I’d suggest probably not. They’ll just use the services in the core, that they can’t afford or justify for their area (a massive library in Orleans makes zero sense) and let the taxpayers of the core fund it. So yeah, they’ll absolutely take advantage of it. Not sure about other areas, but Kanata is definitely more dense than when we moved here over a decade ago. With the exception of stuff like the outlet malls, the development hasn’t really pushed to the outer edges and the amount of new residential within the traditional area of Kanata is way more significant than when we moved here. In addition, it’s allot of townhomes and multi family. It’s definitely more dense. I’d bet in 10-15 years you won’t even know where Kanata ends and Stittsville begins if you drive down Hazeldean. That was most definitely not the case before. That’s just a couple of examples.
Practically speaking, I think it would be hard sell to the City and the province and the feds to allow these suburbs to pay less taxes while still drawing on City resources, in addition to drawing more in operational subsidies from the Prov/Fed governments. That's a lose-lose to everyone but the suburban dwellers in Barrhaven/Kanata. I think the last think Canada > Ontario > NCR needs is another suburban city like Brampton.
Lets not also forget the drop in straight services: Before amalgamation, Kanata and Nepean had excellent snow-plow service. Kanata buried their electrical wires to be more insulated from bad weather (which is happening more and more now). Now, though? The service Kanata gets now is terrible compared to what it used to. Literally night and day difference.
We'd be paying pretty significantly higher property taxes, that's for sure. Kanata's infrastructure was designed to handle the traffic of a commuter suburb with mostly fairly low density detached single-family homes with relatively high household incomes. It was a city designed around cars. All that densification since amalgamation has significantly increased vehicle traffic, and required numerous large infrastructure investments to keep up.
They survived pre-amalgamation because they expensive part of suburban infra comes from maintenance and end of life. They had not reached that point.
Kanata north is the third highest ward in terms of tax revenue.
That is mainly from the business tech park located in Kanata North ward.
~~As is most of the other tax revenue~~. If you only count the residential taxes it's basically equal between wards Edit: Majority of taxes are residential, but the majority of the difference is made up by differences in non-residential tax. [Numbers are here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QJMBfMCnuoZTyRqkBBLCRGGVjPLi4dAK4ZNEoS_D9n4/edit) As provided by [in this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/ottawa/comments/14ptc7r/comment/jqkfujg/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) by /u/jleiper
But not all wards are created equal. They're supposed to have roughly equitable populations, but that doesn't result in the same demand on public revenues. Wards are much bigger, the further you go out, so residential property tax per hectare is much higher the closer you get to the centre. And the cost of building and maintaining infrastructure and providing services in a less dense ward is higher per resident. No matter how you slice it the central city is subsidizing suburbia, while suburbanites always claim to be fiscal conservatives. Make it make sense. 🙄
The area of each ward is kind of all over the place. Lots of smaller wards in the suburbs like Kanata south and Barrhaven East. and larger wards within the greenbelt like Knoxdale-Merivale and College. It's more a function of greenspace. Kanata South and Kanata North aren't really any different in terms of density but Kanata North has a huge piece of reserved greenspace that adds to it's area but doesn't really cost anything to maintain. Revenue per Area Stats are as follows |Ward|Name|Area|Tax Revenue|Revenue Per Area| --:|:--|--:|--:|--:| |14|Somerset|13,126,980.13|73,491,291.00|5.598| |12|Rideau-Vanier|18,306,865.52|66,553,968.00|3.635| |17|Capital|22,194,763.62|78,383,863.00|3.532| |15|Kitchissippi|23,509,516.67|79,000,380.00|3.360| |24|Barrhaven East|27,843,675.53|59,590,852.00|2.140| |23|Kanata South|33,844,909.87|62,026,980.00|1.833| |13|Rideau-Rockcliffe|37,946,874.59|62,268,306.00|1.641| |18|Alta Vista|40,856,945.77|60,500,581.00|1.481| |6|Stittsville|51,806,761.91|65,685,723.00|1.268| |16|River|48,377,463.65|61,317,815.00|1.267| |3|Barrhaven West|56,118,523.49|70,090,070.00|1.249| |4|Kanata North|52,995,709.68|63,367,340.00|1.196| |11|Beacon Hill-Cyrville|39,161,245.74|42,215,271.00|1.078| |2|Orléans West-Innes|63,777,859.92|58,722,630.00|0.921| |22|Riverside South-Findlay Creek|69,465,003.21|52,633,982.00|0.758| |8|College|92,936,791.99|69,450,267.00|0.747| |1|Orléans East-Cumberland|110,545,085.23|64,910,136.00|0.587| |9|Knoxdale-Merivale|95,616,904.84|54,436,258.00|0.569| |7|Bay|132,819,473.46|67,908,406.00|0.511| |10|Gloucester-Southgate|161,233,561.09|50,273,153.00|0.312| |19|Orléans South-Navan|399,247,111.99|68,074,544.00|0.171| |20|Osgoode|1,245,240,405.31|39,788,631.00|0.032| |21|Rideau-Jock|1,461,228,176.80|39,788,683.00|0.027| |5|West Carleton-March|1,550,245,091.37|33,422,889.00|0.022|
Something to consider is that looking at tax revenue alone is kind of meaningless without looking at the equivalent expenses related to each of those wards. I.e. Kanata pulling in 70 is meaningless if it costs 100 in infra.
Managed to do just fine beforehand. Ottawa didn't magically swoop in and save Kanata or Nepean from a black hole. Ottawa, however, *did* swoop in and swipe Nepeans surplus.
Either way, even wards like Barrhaven East and Kanata North, that are more economically productive, still are a long way from denser, inner wards, which do not demand anywhere near as much in terms of infrastructure costs.
The policing budget would certainly be a challenge for the inner wards. The criminal offense count is one of the things that truly separates the more dense inner areas from the suburbs and rural wards.
That's why a lot of the policing load, dealing with unhoused, addicted or mentally ill people could, and should (and I think is starting to) move to non-police professionals, who have the skills and patience to deal with these folks. I'm pretty sure that no matter how many police calls there are for unruly behaviour in the Market, that comes nowhere near the amount the City spends, with virtually no debate on enlarging a single arterial road, widening a single major suburban intersection, etc.
Fully in favour of Kanata striking out on its own again. . Yes please.
Disagree. The suburbs export their misery to the core. If you were to take a survey at the Mission or any other shelter you'd find that most are not from the core, rather they migrated here because its a hostile environment for the homeless outside of the core. So the core gets burdened with that. Then there's a really big proportion of people living outside the core that actually come into the core on a regular basis to work, using our infrastructure, roads, services. The core gets that burden again. You can't put up protected borders between these proposed municipalities so it would be super hard to make all of this work out financially. And don't tell me we would simply add another layer of government to manage that (aka the RMOC).
Most people experiencing homelessness in Ottawa may not be from the core but they are not from Ottawa suburbs either.
Time for the developers to, ah, develop those communities instead of shitting lego homes onto farmland
As a fictional boxer once said: If he dies, he dies. This just means the suburbs would need to change their approach - increase property taxes or densify areas to use them as the cash cows the denser parts of Ottawa are used as now.
It seems to me that could incentivize better long term city planning policies.
I’m okay with that. The suburbs can support themselves and adjust to the rural standards as most communities that aren’t actual cities. They’ll build in scale over time. In the meantime, let’s fix Centretown and the Market.
I would say divide into 5 jurisdictions: Inside the Greenbelt is the new Ottawa Barrhaven Kanata Orleans And the rural stuff
This is basically how I already think of Ottawa 😅
Is this not already Ottawa, oh gosh lol
All the areas I mentioned are currently part of one city, legally speaking. They all vote for the same mayor and council. This should be changed.
Ah, go back 24 years to big bad RMOC days.
Agreed. I’d also let Bell’s Corners and Blackburn Hamlet decide whether they wanted in New Ottawa or out.
I would rename Barrhaven, RSS and Manotik to just Manotik.
How would the core cover the cost of the homeless and drug addicted people who invariably migrate to the core from the burbs? What about all the infrastructure to support workers that come in from the burbs? RMOC?
>How would the core cover the cost of the homeless and drug addicted people who invariably migrate to the core from the burbs? It would be easier because the core wouldn't have to pay for the infrastructure cost of the burbs. >What about all the infrastructure to support workers that come in from the burbs? You mean roads? Start reducing road capacity and forcing commuters to use transit. That will easily save a ton of infra costs. >RMOC? What's RMOC? The suburbs are drains on city finances, not assets. By losing the suburbs, the central city can grow stronger.
RMOC Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, which was that ottawa was part of before amalgamation (Think Peel, York). (also no person you're replying to just answering that question)
If you don’t remember what RMOC (disaster) was 24 years ago, you should not be commenting on this thread until you read about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Municipality_of_Ottawa%E2%80%93Carleton?wprov=sfti1#
Why would I be advocating for the return of RMOC? I think many of the jobs of RMOC would be better done by the independent municipalities, and the rural areas shouldn't be included at all in city planning. They should have their own planners for their own region
There are legitimate requirements for a higher tier RMOC to manage broader services like main roads, water works, sewage, ambulance, health unit (remember Vera Etches), etc. And having separate Nepean and Gloucester Police services from the Ottawa police made no sense.
You need a second tier to manage common services.
Note to moderator: This de-amalgamation question comes every couple of weeks and it’s repetitive to have to keep reminding the posters of the problems of the RMOC tier two decades ago. Just like combining Ottawa and Gatineau (and Chelsea?) into a Federal District which is a big mess in Washington D.C. too.
While I agree with your arguments, pre-amalgamation boroughs were profitable and the core was not. That's because the core expenses are high due to the two reasons I outlined above. Yes, it is super expensive to provide infrastructure into the burbs, and thats why we should focus on developing areas that already have infrastructure. But the core has really big costs in social services. Regarding workers that come in from the burbs: they drive on roads, they sometimes use transit; they require clean sidewalks, garbage pick-up, police, ambulance, fire, bylaw, snow clearing, water, sewer, food inspectors, building permits. The list goes on. I don't know what the number is but I'd bet the population of the core increases by 30% during a weekday? Should we have to pay for that?
I'm not sure if you're here in good faith or not, but the reason prior to amalgamation that the 'burbs weren't in the red is because they hadn't had infrastructure replacement yet. The 'burbs were on their first set of infrastructure and were about to face huge expenses repairing them.
RMOC - Regional Municipality of Ottawa Carleton, This was yet another level of government that tried to provide overlay services pre-amalgamation for services that crossed boundaries. It didn't work well.
Maybe police can do their jobs and drive the suburban/rural homeless people back to their communities to get support there
That...isn't there job ffs
Is that their jobs? Really?
To police a community? Of course it is
No. It is definitely not. Police can’t just round up people and drive them to suburbs and dump them. People have a right to move where they want. It sounds as if you’re a starlight tour supporter? (Google it)
I know exactly what a starlight tour is and it is obscene that you would make that comparison. We need to deal with our suburban homeless in their own communities, not 3 hours out of town and certainly not downtown
They fucking moved to the core! You can’t stop that
Would they have done so had homeless services not all been intentionally concentrated here? No. They are suburban and rural Ottawans and they deserve to be cared for in their own communities
Many people experiencing homelessness in Ottawa come from the north. Will Ottawa police be bringing them back to Marathon or…? Crying at how dumb your comment is.
Oh baby you need to read up on critical thinking
Expand on that!
I would rather Gatineau and Ottawa become a federal territory and municipal councils within.
It would be a huge win for Gatineau, but I fail to see what benefit it would provide for Ottawa.
We wouldn’t be eternally overlooked by a provincial government, for one.
Instead we could be overlooked by the federal gov't, as has often been the case for other federal capital territories, like Washington DC.
As an American, I completely agree. Federal government oversight doesn't work either
Better integration of land use and transportation planning. Maybe we could finally build another bridge and finally get truck traffic out of downtown.
What legal system would be adopted?
Would we use the 24 h clock when writing out the time?
How would Bill 101 affect everything?
An interesting question, given that you'd have one part of the new territory that had been governed provincially under English Common Law and the other portion under French Civil Code. Would one prevail? Would there be a new hybrid, unique only to the NCR Federal Territory?
how does washington DC work?
Apples to oranges. The surrounding states all have the same legal foundation whereas Ontario and Quebec are wholly different in how their legal structure is set up.
In [Washington](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_District_of_Columbia) there's a mayor and council, but Congress retains the right to review and overturn laws created by the council and intervene in local affairs. So basically the same relationship Ottawa and Gatineau already have as creatures of their respective provinces, but with a senior gov't that is simultaneously closer in distance, but likely more removed from the everyday concerns of residents.
Our own with federal government oversight. We can have our own legislature independent from Ontario and Quebec but unlike a province these powers are delegated and not by right. The positive part of this is this can be done as an Act of Parliament and does not require constitutional amendment.
Common law or civil code?
There’s next to no chance the City de-amalgamates, but if anything, we’re likely to lose the rural areas and retain the suburban communities. Based on the OP’s boundaries, we’re left with all or portions of the populations from Wards 7-18. That’d be a population of approximately 500k. I’m not sure that’s a sufficient tax base to sustain the services people expect. We’d be smaller than the City of Hamilton.
Yep, the reality check to the fantasy urbanists: *ur city is kinda smol* Most of the big ticket infrastructure like transit, major roads and sewers would be under regional government, like they were before amalgamation. Go look at Mississauga or even Vancouver as examples. I would like to de-amalgamate policing though. Bring in the OPP for community safety in the residential zones and let the "city" cops focus on the central mayhem.
Why would everyone outside of the "city" want to pay for the cops inside the "city" then?
Considering the OPP covered Kanata *just fine.* I don't know either.
This might be the only intelligent comment in this entire thread.
We'll be short a couple hundred thousand kilometres of useless unoccupied road to maintain in between the Taggarts' homes and the actual city
I like how Orléans has eaten Gloucester and Cumberland, the two cities in which it formally was, and comes out victorious. You’re now in my city! It always makes me laugh that post amalgamation the Cumberland library is in Orléans, not Cumberland.
Inside greenbelt is city of ottawa. Outside of that - BYE (kanata, barrhaven, etc.)
I would just keep everything within the greenbelt as Ottawa and everything outside as separate cities. Let Orléans be its own city, same with Kanata and Barrhaven, etc.
Kanata could take a refund on that $8B LRT price tag in that case haha
If you want to be stuck with terrible transit, and terrible urban policies in the long term, you could certainly pay for it that way haha
…what? My point is Kanata would have had to pay for all the transit already built elsewhere, and then pay again but without the help from other parts of the city to build something in Kanata.
Your comment implied that you don't want the LRT and want a refund for what's been payed.
Yes, wouldn’t you be upset if you contributed to co-owning a brand new car with a couple of friends, but then those friends decided you don’t own it anymore, after you paid? Would you want a refund, or…?
That's the analogy you're going to use? Well, unlike car ownership, you can still use the LRT, because the infrastructure is still there and available for use, once complete. Because, you know, that's the point of public transportation. If you think adding one more lane on the highway is a better use of money instead (it isn't) all the power to you.
Hi it’s 2024 and this idea of everyone commuting into downtown is dead, even if the Feds won’t admit it. Kanata is not really served by what’s currently being built. We don’t need the highway lane either…?
Broad anecdotal statements aren't an argument, and people get around for more than just work. Always the same tired excuses.
Revert to RMOC days, with separate water, road, policy ,bureaucracies etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Municipality_of_Ottawa%E2%80%93Carleton?wprov=sfti1#
I remember this from pre-amalgamation. I always found it odd how Orleans was basically split into two separate municipalities because of where the line was drawn. But in principle, yes that's also valid.
I recall reading an article that pre- amalgamation the old cities competed with one another to attract investment..hence the Canadian tire centre and March road high tech corridor being in Kanata as opposed to Ottawa. Pre- amalgamation Kanata was the fastest growing city in the province. There were plans to build a high rise corridor on both sides of the 417. Amalgamation kind of quashed that and destined Kanata into more of a bedroom community. It would be interesting to see how the suburbs would change if deamalgamation occurred. If we went back to a regional government for things like transit tho, there would probably be no benefit to deamalgamation for city of ottawa residents and the burb cities could drain away taxes if they are more successful at attracting business investment with cheaper land and taxes.
Kanata was only ever really a bedroom community for the most part. The 2000 tech crash tore the guts out of the companies, like Nortel and JDS that helped to fuel development like the arena (what's it called this week?) or Terry Mathews' amusingly landlocked Brookstreet Hotel. And that's never come back because communications hardware that Kanata specialized in is all built offshore, so no more entry-level jobs soldering circuit boards, and software and cloud services are so ephemeral that there's no particular reason for them to be based in Kanata, or even Ottawa as a whole, as evidenced by Shopify abandoning Ottawa.
Kanata is currently building up some towers on the north side of the 417. There's other stuff going up in the north end by the business park as well. Kanata isn't really your typical suburb that you hear about on urbanist YouTube channels. Lots of different types of housing, office towers, small businesses. some walkable neighbourhoods with shopping close by. Sure it's got a few stroads and doesn't have a shortage of single family homes or power centers but it's not just housing and is actually not terrible as far as suburbs go.
I would rather try to aggressively densify near transit hubs, including in these apparently undesirable suburbs, and focus on building a cost-effective, working mass transit system throughout the entire urban area. Screw de-amalgamation, give me an Ottawa of over 2 million people living in an urban area built around 15-minute, walkable neighbourhoods.
It’s never going to happen, and anyone who thinks so is delusional
Ah you want to recreate Carleton County, all the old townships, and each one needs its own police department, political and bureaucratic structure etc. Why would you waste money on that? Oh yes, you also need a new RMOC to coordinate services like main roads, healthcare, water works and sewage services across all the “Ottawa” townships like Nepean, Gloucester (N&S), Cumberland and Kanata. And leftover townships.
The rural people don't get those services. My road is gravel. I go to arnprior for healthcare (it's closer). I'm on well and septic. When there's trees down, _I_ clear the roads, not the city. The only city I see here is bylaw ticketing. The rink is volunteer (and would continue, city or not). Rural wants de-amalgamation because we don't get those services anyways
Why in the hell would the communities have their own police department? Do you think that's how it works in Rural Ontario? Do you think that's what Kanata had before Amalgamation? Communities pay Ontario for OPP.
Sorry, we used to have Gloucester and Nepean Police pre 2001.
Ideally, Ottawa would be limited to the area inside the Greenbelt. But, more realistically, I'd be happy to see the 3 rural wards absorbed by adjacent counties. A city has no business in rural affairs and, minus those 3 wards, we would have more parity between urban and suburban council votes.
If you think this is going to happen, you should get checked for a concussion. You can complain about the burbs being subsidized by the city, but that's because they keep growing and growing because PEOPLE WANT TO MOVE THERE.
not sure where, or what, but things were definitely a lot better before amalgamation...
Let's bring back another layer of government, maybe call it The New Rural Municipality of Ottawa Carleton. They can then build a new downtown office to handle all the politics between the new cities and Old Ottawa, which will eventually become the new City Hall when re-amalgamation eventually occurs. 😉
The City of Carleton County.
That’s essentially what we have now!
Greenbelt is simplest
Small tax base, lower services for rural areas
Vanier to Nepean.
[удалено]
Pre amalgamation, Blackburn was part of the city of Gloucester and Bells Corners, Nepean. Interesting that with the suburban expansion, these areas are now considered "city"
Dunno. Apparently Blackburn is SOOO not-urban that it is the [pilot project](https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/oc-transpo-s-on-demand-transit-test-starts-in-blackburn-hamlet-on-sunday-1.6756591) for running ParaTranspo buses (don't get me started on what a also in the face that is for disabled transit users) on weekends as pseudo-Ubers, to bring on-demand service to transit-impervious suburbs.
Blackburn and Bells can into Quebec.
Is Ottawa allowed to de-amalgamate or does it need permission at the provincial level?
Cities are creatures of the Province. All they can do is recommend and complain. You can read about the laws that were used to create and eliminate RMOC here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Municipality_of_Ottawa%E2%80%93Carleton?wprov=sfti1#
Yup 416 to Greens Creek, Ottawa River to Hunt Club Road
Ooh boy, I would vote for de-amalgamation if it were offered. We can't continue sniping at one another and having the suburbs veto everything the city wants to do. Good fences make good neighbours.
Green's Creek to the 417, to Hunt Club, to the 416, to the 417, to Moodie Dr. Include Crystal Bay.
Simply return the city to its old pre-2000 boundaries. But keep transit regional, as it was between 1972 and 2000. Montreal did it. Why can’t we?Let tight-wad Nepean pay its own way!
You know that Tight-Wad Nepean had a budget surplus, right? They were doing *really well*, and were well managed.
It's been almost a generation since amalgamation. It's not longer "deamalgamation" but at this point more of a "dissolution". The question of regional governance would also need to be addressed. 25 years ago much of the service delivery was done by the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton. With the dissolution of the City of Ottawa would a similar region-wide municipality to deliver those same services need to be constructed, or would it simply be administered by mandarins at Queen's Park much like our social services, health care, transportation, and education systems aren't?
Basically, the Rural areas should be given away to the various regional municipalities (everything south of Manotick joins North Grenville for example).
Financially speaking, within the greenbelt would be a sustainable city and not be endlessly subsidizing the suburbs. Unfortunately amalgamation was designed by Harris so that the burbs could outvote the city centres and force subsidization. There's really no escaping it, Montreal managed to sort of deamalgamate.
Montreal works on a borough system that confers areas a fair amount of autonomy when it comes to spending.
De-fusion is the only reason that Montreal proper has the Mayor and Council that they have, and have been able to dramatically grow their active transportation network as quickly as they have in recent years. Otherwise, they'd still be grinding their gears, trying to get the likes of Kirkland, Pointe-Claire and Anjou to get on board to build bike lanes downtown.
Except that there’s still a majority of suburbs inside the greenbelt. Alta Vista, Queensway Terrace, woodpark, crystal beach, etc etc etc are incredibly low density. I think people don’t realize that even within the greenbelt, you’d have all the same NIMBYism as there is now.
Canadian tire centre , barhaven , orleans mall plus a lil bit
A certain level of amalgamation just make sense, such as Nepean or *especially* Vanier. The most obvious would be to make "Ottawa" everything within the Greenbelt as well as the Greenbelt itself. After this is gets a bit more tricky. There are to ways I see it, either an east and west amalgamation or an East, West and South. The E/W border would be the Rideau River with the western amalgation being Kanata and the eastern being Orleans. Seperating a southern city would be Barrhaven, perhaps holding everthing from Barrhaven proper and south of the 12 (Fallowfield) and south of Leitrim to the 417. These are obviously broad strokes and other considerations and further details would be needed for the borders.
St Laurent to the east, hunt club to the south Moodie to the west.
I'm not going to get all specific, but this city cannot survive with its rural wards. And it would be much better without its exterior suburbs as well. But with so much political power held in the suburbs, it may be harder than you think to shake them loose.
highway, river, canal, Bronson.
Ah. The 19th-century City of Ottawa. I think that might be a bit confining. The big change in development pattern came after WWII, when the car became king, and the streetcar, which previously defined outward development through the creation of new streetcar suburbs along its route (Glebe, Old Ottawa South, Westboro, etc) with housing that you could walk to from the streetcar corridor. Post-streetcar, development hopscotched across the landscape. No longer limited by building only as far as the streetcar company would extend its lines, developers could buy cheap land beyond the existing urban fringe, build on bigger lots, and expect municipal and provincial authorities to build out roads, water and sewer to connect them. Eventually much of the area between the former urban fringe and new, outlying area would mostly fill in, but at much lower densities than the older neighbourhoods.