Green Book Reviews

Pamela Blais’ first book targets the (all too) well-known phenomenon of urban sprawl – the low-grade fabric of cookie-cutter subdivisions, big-box power centres, remote office parks and tawdry commercial strips – none of which can be accessed without a car. Sprawl, Blais points out, is an extremely inefficient way of building communities. It sucks up enormous quantities of non-renewable resources (such as energy, land, building materials and water) and spits out a stream of wastes (greenhouse gases, air pollutants, garbage) that choke the planet’s survival systems.

The book’s main insight is that we have been barking up the wrong tree when it comes to stemming urban sprawl. We put our faith in planners and planning institutions to undo sprawl’s litany of predations. We create regional plans, draw growth boundaries around cities and zone for higher-density housing. Yet Canada continues to sprawl like there is (literally) no tomorrow.

The planning approach would make sense if poor planning policies were the main cause of sprawl. But, as Blais points out, this is only one source of the problem. The Toronto-based consultant argues that economic signals are a more fundamental driver.

Blais brings this assertion down to Earth with a plethora of examples. Development charges are the fees that municipalities slap on developers of new real estate projects so that they can provide the infrastructure (water, sewage, roads) needed to service the new community. However, the same per-unit fee is paid whether a project is infilling an empty space in the city centre where services are already nearby, or clinging onto the periphery of the city where new infrastructure has to travel a long way. Since these charges can reach $30,000 to $40,000 on a residential unit, they represent a hefty subsidy to sprawl.

** This review first appeared in Alternatives Journal 37.6: 40th Anniversary Issue, published in October 2011.
Click here to see more of that issue. **

The same applies to a slew of other price signals: property taxes, network service rates (water, electricity, gas, telephone, cable, postal services, internet connectivity), municipal service charges (garbage collection, snow removal, recycling), mortgage rates and parking fees. Blais convincingly shows how a new approach to pricing, based on the true cost of supplying infrastructure and services to different locations and for different types of land use, would transform these price signals from sprawl-makers into sprawl-busters.

Short listed for the 2011 Donner Prize, awarded each year to the best book on Canadian public policy, Perverse Cities is generally well written (although a little rambling in the early parts, and repetitive in later sections) and makes interesting reading (especially for policy wonks). Nonetheless, it suffers from a few weaknesses.

First, urban planning is not quite the failure that Blais makes it out to be. Early results suggest that the ambitious urban planning effort in Southern Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe, where Blais lives, is helping rein in sprawl. And planning success in Vancouver and Portland, Oregon, receive short shrift.

Perverse Cities proposes that if we juggled the fiscal system so that property taxes, service fees and utility charges accurately reflected the cost of delivering infrastructure and services in different locations and at different densities, then we would not need urban planning at all – sprawl would solve itself. If this were the case, however, we would expect Canada to be more sprawling than the US, where planning systems are weaker and property rights are sacrosanct. But the opposite is true: Canadian cities (and suburbs) are generally denser, more compact and contiguous than their US counterparts.

Another of the book’s shortcomings is its political naiveté. Homeowners have invested in their location and transportation choices (suburban homes and multiple vehicles) based on the existing constellation of price signals. Wholesale changes to this system would require massive dislocations in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Large suburban homes would lose value and driving to work from a distant suburb would become prohibitively expensive. Politicians would be understandably hesitant to make the changes required to bring this about.

Finally, the author is sometimes a little cavalier with the evidence. For example, to support her contention that planning is part of the problem, Blais claims that the massive new greenbelt around Toronto and Hamilton is having the disastrous effect of causing development to leapfrog outside the greenbelt. As evidence, she refers the reader to a Neptis Foundation report that was published in 2004, a year before the greenbelt was created.

Blais’ focus on the idea that the drivers of sprawl are hidden in our utility and tax bills might gradually tame some of the economic forces that are grinding against the planning system. However, the author seems to have been carried away by the seductive logic of free-market thinking, a logic that ultimately impugns urban planning. And that, as they say, is a pity.

Ray Tomalty, an urban-sustainability consultant, is an adjunct professor in the School of Urban Planning at McGill University.