
Downtown Revitalization:
Revitalizing Calgary’s downtown core is essential to significantly boosting business activity and generating the economic growth that will power us forward with jobs and revenue.
Enhancing infrastructure, offering mixed-use development, ensuring safe and clean public spaces, and maintaining efficient and accessible transportation options are all key ingredients.
By attracting small, medium and large businesses back to our city centre, property tax revenue from commercial properties will increase and the tax burden on residential homeowners will decrease. If Calgary is to have a more balanced tax structure, downtown revitalization is the answer.
Blanket Rezoning and Development:
Densification through blanket rezoning is not a smart strategy for increasing the housing supply and is not likely to provide more affordable housing.
Blanket rezoning increases the construction of generic, high-density buildings that diminish the character of more established neighbourhoods. It targets older communities with aging water and sewer infrastructure that cannot handle the strain of the added population without costly and time-consuming upgrades. It encourages speculative investors who build high-density, high-cost developments that are far from affordable. And it drives redevelopment of properties that already house low-income and vulnerable residents, in turn leading to a reduction of affordable housing options for those displaced.
In most cases, blanket rezoning is far from being an affordable housing strategy. It’s a one size fits all plan in a city that requires a more nuanced approach to urban planning.
Further densification is needed, but should be focused along transit corridors, under-utilized commercial districts such as the downtown core and in neighbourhoods already zoned high-density and with room to expand and grow.
Public Transit and Green Line:
At the core of every well run, growing and prosperous city is a transit system that is efficient and reliable for all its citizens.
Calgary is one of Canada’s fastest growing cities, so it is essential we enhance transit to all areas of the city, but especially to those south Calgary communities that have been under-served by transit for quite some time.
I am in favour of the Green Line LRT project as is currently being revised between the City of Calgary and the province. I believe the revised alignment enhances the overall network, ensuring that far more residents can access public transit easily, quickly and more affordably.
Because transit has high operating and capital investment costs, and a fare cost structure which makes it accessible to everyone, it almost always operates at a loss. The Green Line project (and all transit in general) is a costly investment, but a necessary one to ensure we decrease traffic congestion and grow our economy by moving people to jobs, students to schools, tourists to attractions, and shoppers to retail businesses.
Property Taxes:
The issue of property taxes in Calgary is complex and is largely driven by factors such as economic cycles, downtown vacancies, and fiscal management challenges that appear to be present at City Hall.
Financial stewardship, and a “back to basics” approach, can balance these complexities while continuing to provide essential core services Calgary needs to run efficiently in a population growth environment.
It’s no longer sustainable to fund pet projects.
The focus must be on diversifying and promoting a fair business environment, cutting unnecessary spending, more diligent fiscal management, and determining other ways to reduce reliance on property tax revenue.
Making life more affordable for all Calgarians can only be done if we keep taxes low.