Can Hamilton, Ontario, Hold the Line on Development—Literally?

Hamilton, Ontario. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

If you drive down Barton Street East in Hamilton, Ontario, you’re in for a bumpy time, as voters in a recent survey proclaimed it Ontario’s worst road. A gimmick, perhaps, but one indicative of a larger truth: Hamilton, like most large North American cities, has dire infrastructure problems.

A recent city analysis found that Hamilton has a multibillion-dollar infrastructure maintenance deficit. Beginning to close it might require spending an additional $200 million each year over 10 years on the upkeep of “core assets” like roads, sidewalks, bridges, and water infrastructure. This translates to a tax hike of $850 annually on the average household, the city’s finance manager told the Hamilton Spectator in June. This will squeeze residents in a place where cost of living is becoming extreme. Canada has one of the world’s worst housing affordability crises, and house prices have risen 40% in Hamilton since the pandemic.

The poor situation of the public infrastructure isn’t due to Hamilton being a stagnant or depressed place. Canada’s 10th-largest city, it has experienced robust population growth and steady immigration, and its population is projected to grow by 236,000 people to a total of 820,000 by 2051. But there’s an increasingly shared understanding that the city’s model of growth hasn’t brought a secure prosperity, and something needs to change.

Hamilton, like nearly every North American city of its size, is a full participant in the Growth Ponzi Scheme. For decades, rapid suburbanization has expanded the city’s footprint and allowed new subdivisions and business plazas to sprout. Each one offered a short-term sugar rush of revenue to the municipal coffers, but this spread-out approach to development also introduced long-term liabilities—all those new roads, bridges, and pipes—in excess of the city’s ability to pay for their long-term maintenance.

Hamilton has a formal urban growth boundary that dictates the extent of suburban expansion, and for decades the council in this city of half a million has voted every few years to move that line out, out, out, like clockwork.

But not this time. In late 2021, after intense debate and a vigorous public “Stop Sprawl” campaign, Hamilton’s council made an unprecedented decision to hold the line where it is. This doesn’t mean Hamilton won’t grow. It means the city will plan for future growth—236,000 new residents in 30 years—by thickening up, allowing infill and redevelopment in neighborhoods already built and served by infrastructure.

Houses along the Urban Growth Boundary in Hamilton, Ontario. (Source: Google.)

How “Holding the Line” Became a Mainstream Idea

Hamilton’s situation might be unfamiliar to readers in the U.S., where central cities are typically fully developed and hemmed in by suburbs with their own legal jurisdiction. In Hamilton, the municipal boundary is so big that 60% of the city’s land area is rural. Within that “box,” the growth boundary dictates the extent of denser development and suburban-style levels of service. Under this system, “whether to expand outward” becomes a discrete decision, rather than the consequence of a hundred small, separate decisions.

The question was always a wonky, niche one, of interest to environmentalists and urbanists. But it has recently become a topic for mainstream politics. According to Paul Shaker, an urban planner advising the Stop Sprawl Hamilton group, this is the result of a confluence of interests producing what has become a durable and effective coalition. Concerns motivating an increased skepticism of suburban growth-as-usual range from climate change to housing affordability to rising taxes and infrastructure costs. For many residents, the motivation is simply fears about declining quality of life.

“We’ve always had pretty good minds at the table to make the policy case,” says Shaker. “We’ve had the hollowing-out problem in our cities, much like the U.S. But the difference this time is that residents organized on their own, regular citizens, self-learning on the fly. It was an impressive mobilization.” Stop Sprawl Hamilton conducted public opinion surveys and sought to mobilize opponents of boundary expansion to weigh in before the council’s decision. And it successfully swayed that decision, despite a recommendation from Hamilton’s own planning staff to move the boundary.

The evidence is, indeed, on the side of the freeze-the-boundary coalition, and in a way that has become more evident to Canadians in recent years. In 2014, the City of Ottawa commissioned a study which found that each new low-density home built on undeveloped land in Ottawa produced a net deficit of $465 annually for local government, even after property taxes and utility fees were taken into account. On the other hand, higher-density infill development leaves the city with a surplus of $606 per year. These numbers are specific to Ottawa’s context, but were widely cited in the debate in Hamilton.

Meanwhile, in 2018, Calgary’s decision to add 14 new subdivisions drove a citywide increase of 2% in property taxes and fees, according to a Globe and Mail editorial. In 2020, Calgary rejected 11 proposed subdivisions, in response to this mounting evidence of the negative fiscal impact.

Not all development is a net negative, and the coalition that pushed to freeze Hamilton’s boundary is not an anti-development one. In the U.S. it’s common for environmental organizations to align with a slow-growth agenda or oppose virtually all development, including infill. But Canada’s housing shortage is acute, and “we don’t need to build more homes” is not a winning argument in Ontario. Environmental groups in Hamilton are explicit that their vision is for infill development and further urbanization, not for putting a lid on the city’s population.

The big question is what that will look like. The idea is easier in generalities than in the particulars, and the biggest threat to the “stop sprawl” vision now is that Hamilton will fail to pass a viable plan for infill growth. It’s likely that some of the advocates comfortable signing on to a general “stop sprawl” vision will be less comfortable with a vision that stipulates, “This is how your neighborhood is going to intensify.” Already, at least one councilor is seeking to have his ward exempted from new housing provisions, and debate over the details of “missing middle” and accessory dwelling unit proposals has been contentious.

Shaker says time was lost in the battle over the growth boundary that could have gone to helping people envision what an infill growth scenario will look like for Hamilton, and what its benefits will be. “You can really neutralize NIMBYism when you show people what they will gain,” he told me. Shaker likes to emphasize that what Hamilton’s no-boundary-expansion plan envisions is not a radical departure for the city: it’s just a return to development forms that are already in Hamilton’s DNA. Missing-middle housing like triplexes and small apartment buildings already exist throughout the city, much of it dating to a pre-suburban era. Parts of central Hamilton have actually lost population since the mid-20th century, and would simply be returning to a state that already existed and worked. Even ambitious transit plans are more about reclamation of a legacy than departure from one: Hamilton, like many North American cities, had a robust streetcar network that was dismantled post-World War II.

New infill could largely replicate the mixed development pattern already present in older Hamilton neighborhoods. (Source: Google.)

That is the work ahead of Hamilton: to actually develop and pass a detailed infill plan that includes zoning changes, faster permitting with fewer hurdles, and ultimately opens up a market-viable way for the city to grow through a combination of high-rise, missing-middle, and detached home development. Out of 110,000 housing units needed by 2050, 88,000 would be directed to built-up parts of the city, while 22,000 would be in “greenfield” areas already within the boundary and slated for development.

In Canada, where provincial control of cities is stronger than in the U.S., the provincial government must approve whatever plan Hamilton passes. And the province has the option of simply overriding Hamilton’s plan—perhaps implementing one of the alternate options that staff developed which included moving the urban growth boundary.

Ontario’s government is likely to look upon Hamilton’s plan with a skeptical eye. The conservative administration of premier Doug Ford enjoys strong ties with suburban developers, and has taken a hard line in support of additional suburban-style development throughout Ontario, often invoking the need to bring down high housing costs as the primary rationale. In October of 2021, Ontario’s minister of municipal affairs and housing, Steve Clark, wrote a scathing op-ed in the Spectator, calling Hamilton’s plan to freeze boundary expansion “unrealistic and irresponsible.”

Supporters of Hamilton’s decision feared that the province would override it before provincial elections in June 2022. This fear proved unfounded, and now Shaker thinks the province is likely to let the local process play out. But that doesn’t mean, once it does, that the provincial authorities will let it stand. They will have to be convinced, at the very least, that the market will deliver meaningful amounts of infill housing under Hamilton’s plan—that it’s not just legal on paper.

The provincial government has leaned on the need for housing to insist that boundaries be expanded, but this is a red herring. There is enough underutilized land within Hamilton’s existing boundary to accommodate many decades of growth. But will the city make the choices that lead to that?

Subdivision developers will no doubt continue to lobby for future boundary expansions. Just four development companies own about half the land in Elfrida, the area that was next on the table to be incorporated into Hamilton’s urban growth boundary. And they won’t sit quietly. Developers in favor of suburban expansion in Ontario have launched astroturf web pages and postcard campaigns. The debate over what kind of city Hamilton will be in the 21st century is far from finished.

Despite the success of Stop Sprawl Hamilton and its allies in moving the conversation, there’s no magic “Stop Sprawl” button, and Hamilton certainly hasn’t pressed one. The decision not to expand the boundary, though, is a significant step in rejecting the Growth Ponzi Scheme: the failed 20th-century paradigm of meeting a growing population’s needs by simply letting the bulldozers rip through farm fields while the urban core falls apart. This decision can and should be the start, rather than the culmination, of a better approach to growth.

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