Should we tell private business where to go?
First off a few qualifications. I’m very appreciative of the mayor’s and DWBIA Executive’s efforts to return Summerfest to Downtown. I’m told it was a 4- 4 1/2 hour meeting and was a struggle. The DWBIA Chair Ron Balla made some decisions that he worried might not be fully supported and because of the hard work of volunteers and his gamble we have a summerfest where it belongs
Only one thing bothered me. The mayor made a statement that we don’t want to be seen as telling Private business where to locate. This might be sound like a nitpick but this has become a theme for me lately. Whether it be someone questioning my desire to district the downtown, rezone agricultural land to office space or questioning the decisions of parades and festivals
The answer to the question, is a RESOUNDING YES
Every successful city does this. Why the hell do we, as taxpayers fund the building a festival plaza and stage if not to hold festivals and concerts there?
Why do we as taxpayers fund the building industrial infrastructure if not to build manufacturing. Of coursein our case we wasted that infrastructure by building office, commercial and retail space on top of it.
Why create tax incentives for areas and streetscaping infrastructure only to see them fill with poorly operated nightclubs and massage parlors?
FESTIVALS AND PARADES
Look, you have to ask yourself some questions. Is it right for Canada Day Parade to annually be sold to the highest bidder. Look at the Santa Parade, few years back Sandwich Bought it from downtown. I’m told the going price to buy it from Sandwich is $35,000. Hey, if some BIA comes up with the money, maybe from a provincial grant, Sorry ’bout your luck Sandwich.
I said in an A Channel interview (that was cut), a warning to Walkerville and Wyandotte Town Centre
Look, I have nothing against them and love those Districts our city but is it right that they can use Provincial funds to move parades. The DWBIA was rejected for those same grant funds applications. Maybe Next year Via Italia is the winning bidder and they rename it “Italian CANADA DAY. OF course that sounds absurd, but in the free market, heck, I guess anything goes. This isn’t bitterness, only a statement of fact
ZONING - allowing commercial wherever they want
In every city the Municipality plays a role on location, the entire reason we have ZONING is for this.
Imagine letting a nightclub go smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
London Ontario does not allow office bldgs to go out of downtown, especially gov’t bldgs. IN London it would simply not have been possible to relocate an MPAC office out of their core.
DISTRICTING
Remember American Apparel failing on Pelissier, I maintain that had this business located next to other clothing retailers downtown, they would have created a cluster and had a much better chance of success
Our Downtown must compete with other shopping districts like Devonshire and Windsor Crossing. These are very managed districts. If we’re ever to compete We need to manage our downtown. These areas would not allow Massage parlors in their locations, Downtown should also zone them off of ouellette and pelissier.
These areas have limits on what types of stores can go where and how many of them they desire. We need to do the same.
That means laying out a vision for the private sector for them to buy into. Guiding residential support businesses to Pelissier, galleries to the Arts District, retail to Ouellette.
Yes, we need to tell business where to go, we do it with a vision and the will to implement that vision without veering from it
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Mark, you nailed it 100%.
Well…maybe not 100%.
Mark, while you are entirely correct that “Yes, we must direct business to certain areas”, and you are also correct that “parade for hire” is not an optimum situation, there are a couple of points that do no hold up.
London may not allow MPAC to move within its borders, there is nothing, in theory, from preventing the London MPAC office from moving to St Thomas or St Mary’s. Why our office shouldn’t be allowed to move to Tecumseh, I don’t know. They can service more customers in that immediate area than they would in Windsor’s downtown. When I need some information from MPAC I was able to get what I needed, thanked them for their time, and hung up the phone. Too easy.
Secondly, the more you regulate and point business toward operating in a specific locale, it makes moving to a more welcoming and less restrictive location all the better decision to make. Be careful for what you wish. You may just get it.
Are citizens here to serve business interests, or vice versa?
Once we figure that out, these decisions should be fairly easy ones.
I think it is a co-dependancy.
Back in the early days of incorporation, a businesses licence could be revolked if it was found not to be acting in the best interest of the citizenry. As far as I know, the wording of papers of incorporation hasn’t changed, just societal values.
I think we need to get the terms of service back to where the health of society is the final measure of success. It seems that is the direction the pendulum is swinging these days. Has there ever been a lower level of trust in the business community?
From Slate:
Don’t Plan On It
Centralized city planning is not the answer to the problems facing America’s cities.
By Witold Rybczynski
Posted Wednesday, March 31, 2010, at 6:58 AM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2249253/
A year ago, President Obama signed an executive order creating a White House Office of Urban Affairs whose stated goal is “the development of a comprehensive urban policy.” The director, inevitably referred to as the urban czar, is Adolfo Carrión Jr., who is trained as a city planner and who has talked about the need for cities to develop their own “smart plans.”
According to Carrión, smart planning involves a combination of walkable communities, mass transit, and bicycle paths, and who could argue with that, except that in the last 40 years, our faith in centralized city planning has changed radically. In short, we’ve lost it. The last binge of planning in the 1960s produced urban renewal, city expressways, and acres of housing projects from which many cities are still only partially recovered. Urban renewal destroyed rather than repaired inner-city neighborhoods, expressways promoted urban blight, and the projects proved environmentally and socially dysfunctional. The result was collective NIMBY-ism—no planning in my backyard, thank you.
The forces shaping our cities today are not municipal agencies but private organizations such as park conservancies, downtown associations, historic-preservation societies, arts councils, advocacy groups, and urban universities. Entrepreneurship also plays an important role. In projects large and small, real estate developers have replaced city planners and bureaucrats as the chief players on the urban scene, restoring neighborhoods, attracting residents to downtowns, helping to create the amenities that keep them there.
The important lesson is not that city planning is unimportant but, rather, that urban development should not be implemented by the public sector alone and that in a democracy, a vision of the future city will best emerge from the marketplace. (That it may turn out to be a messy vision, lacking a grand aesthetic, Jane Jacobs long ago acknowledged.) The federally funded HOPE VI program, which has spent more than $5 billion since it was launched in 1992 and which mixes social housing with market housing, has demonstrated that when public agencies collaborate with private developers, the result can be affordable homes that avoid the stigma traditionally associated with public housing projects. Almost all cities have business improvement districts, quasi-public organizations that were founded to oversee street cleanliness and public safety; in Philadelphia, the BID is also active in planning and urban development. Some cities are experimenting with multi-use zoning, which permits different uses to coexist in the same buildings, leaving the precise mix to market demand. Another interesting innovation comes from Montreal, where the provincial government is building a new $260 million concert hall. Instead of holding an architectural beauty pageant, the government announced a development competition to select a consortium that would not only design and build but also finance, manage, and maintain the hall over 30 years, leasing the building back to the orchestra.
The simple truth is that successful city-building is less about big moves and more about perseverance and day-to-day management. In the present economic downturn—as tax revenues diminish and cities face fewer jobs, no new construction, fewer tourists, fewer conventions, and less state funding—older cities will struggle to repair and replace aging infrastructure, and new cities will be challenged to maintain their growth. Talk of economic stimulus packages raises the temptation to undertake large publicly planned projects again. This temptation should be resisted. The lessons of the last 50 years should not be forgotten. To rephrase that great city planner, Daniel H. Burnham, make no big plans, only many small ones.
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I am betwixt on this one. I think that we have to reign in big-box/mall greenfield development - if not stop it altogether, for one simple reason, we can’t afford the present and future infrastructure costs of developing those lands for something that could disappear in ten years to a “better” location or business arrangements, then sit empty!!!
The outer ring burbs and towns are at the saturation point with big box development, I think, and they to are coming to a point that they can not afford the infrastructure, although they will damn well try, if not just to stick it to us in Windsor.
Personally, I am in agreement with our city planning in the attempt to control outward growth or greenfield development, we can’t keep expanding forever!
I think the article speaks to that, Mark Bradley.
What I read (of course everyone reads something a little bit different) is that by engaging in constructive partnerships with stakeholders, the same end-goal can be accomplished.
“Almost all cities have business improvement districts, quasi-public organizations that were founded to oversee street cleanliness and public safety; in Philadelphia, the BID is also active in planning and urban development. Some cities are experimenting with multi-use zoning, which permits different uses to coexist in the same buildings, leaving the precise mix to market demand. ”
There’s something to be said about that, imo.
To me it says get back to the basics. Forget the urban planning fads, and do what makes sense.
This is the best quote of all time:
“The important lesson is not that city planning is unimportant but, rather, that urban development should not be implemented by the public sector alone and that in a democracy, a vision of the future city will best emerge from the marketplace.”
Use the marketplace to your advantage.
Markham’s food fight
Council is divided on a plan to turn farmland into homes
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/toronto/story.html?id=2758436&p=1#ixzz0kLplEdFM
The bur oak is an official Markham symbol, and this one has grown at the centre of this lush farming field for two centuries, watching quietly as suburbia arrived along 16th Avenue.
But the mesh fence signals change. Soon, this protected tree will be all that remains of the field, a 40-hectare plot containing some of Canada’s richest farmland. The rest will be supplanted by houses.
“This is a symbol of everything we don’t want to lose,” says Councillor Erin Shapero.
Ms. Shapero and council colleague Valerie Burke are spearheading a town council vote on the future of Markham’s so-called foodbelt, a 2,000-hectare swath of top quality farmland. They want to halt development in the foodbelt, which stretches north of Major MacKenzie Drive toward the Oak Ridges Moraine, bounded loosely on the sides by highways 48 and 404.
Forward thinking from BC back in 1973? The government at that time instituted an Argicultural Land Reserve. Land in the reserve was restricted for farming or other agricultural use. There are over 45,000 square kilometres of land in the ALR, all of which is either forested, vacant, or being farmed. To remove land from the ALR is not an easy process - which it shouldn’t be.
Prime agricultural land is being turned into Suburbia - both locally and further afield. Is it too late to create an ALR in Ontario?
” that in a democracy, a vision of the future city will best emerge from the marketplace.”
I don’t believe that. In a market place, there would be no such thing as zoning.
In a marketplace, we have had all kinds of development that I would term as “abortions or stillborn”.
Would you allow escort/massage services wherever, simply because the market decided there was enough demand?
Why not allow the DRTP truck tunnel then? The market dictated there was a demand. Who are we to say that the community didn’t want it.
There is a laundry list of examples that say the market should not and will not ever dictate where and what we build by itself.
Whats in question is not whether we draw a line, whats in question is where do we draw that line.
Y’know what, I think the above comment rocked and that came out of drinking and blogging. I guess you just never know
So, Mark, you’re saying instead of relaying on market indicators we should just dictate what should be built and where it should go without regard to what business and the consumer wants?
Let’s build more retail in the form of “lifestyle centres” when there is a 25% vacancy rate in retail space in the downtown? The market would is dicatating that the demand is shrinking for downtown destinations bust the discussion throughout this site is to develop the CCW.
Where’s the thought process?
Its not an either or LOS. Community gets to have a say. Just like I’m sure you wouldn’t want us to rely solely on the free market to determine who provides child care and garbage pickup and labour rates
Sorry Mark but the community should not have the say where a business goes. In today’s marketplace many a survey and polls are taken to decide where and when a business shoud open just for the marketing impact.
That being said, if the market demanded business locate in a residential area due to need and the residents said no, then what’s the point of servicing the need?
Take a nother step, move the business out of the first area into a secondary choice and now you have the business locating in the suburbs or “sprawling” as another term.
So by controlling what goes where, you have inadvertantly created a problem that everyone seems to think is a bad idea.
The words “build and they will come” does not ring true in today’s market for anything.
You build up on where they are at.
Why do we have zoning?
ZONING
zoning is the bi-product of planning from the past…the concept of zoning derived from the need of people to have equal rights (outside of the realm of choice) to live free of poluted waters, air polution, noice plution and anything else post industrial…..industry of the past was the biggest punisher of the natural and built environments…zoning was created so once a slab of land was destroyed it would stay industrial…that grew into larger parcels of land as well as land they just assumed would be destroyed….all under the umbrella of protecting us from the evils of industry. Fact is now, some of the best and coolest places to live are on industrial land…good luck re-zoning that. Secondly once land is industrial it stays relatively in-expensive…nice little added perk for destroying something.
I just don’t buy that, what if you give my your home addresses and I buy your neighbor and I get to unilaterally decide what goes there. All’s it would take is some unrestricted rezoning.
Maybe a nice auto body shop? They’re in big demand but are difficult to locate due to zoning.
Mark,
Why do you assume such an emotional and irrational example?
We could also interject a no-fly zone over Windsor, just in case they dump their toilet in mid air.
You’re saying you want to control who your neighbour is all in while you want government to satisfy the “zoning” which of course increases tax dollars to pay for this and then business leaves due to overhead.
All this zoning has done is lead to increased business and taxpayer cost because lawyers get huge fees to decide what goes where and that is self evident in this city.
How many years has it taken for DRIC and the new bridge just on envoirnment assessments that people want?
Protecting the envoirnment is a good thing but when forced relocations cause urban sprawling, don’t complain.
But the market does dictate labour rates. Freedom of Movement allows labour to chase the dollar. Witness the exodus from Windsor to Alberta.
The provision of child care and garbage/recycling pick up are also tied to the market. Privatising each will increase costs to the consumer by reducing choices and competition. However, they are very different things than development concerns.
L.O.S., I love your unique perspective on things. At the same time that you argue in favour of market forces and small government, you make the argument that the government backing out of services will increase cost and reduce choice which is usually ascribed to us “big government” liberals.
Chapter and verse please on how outsourcing government services reduces choice and increases cost.
Margaret, There are some (probably many) services that government must deliver including child care and garbage pick up (waste disposal is another matter). That’s just the nature of the beast. Living in a socialist democracy like Canada, over the years social services has become an area where government has built an expertise (generally, not necessarily Windsor). It’s when they try to do too much and get into areas where they really have no business being that bloat occurs.
The problem arises on a micro level when government has taken on these tasks and then begins to shed their responsibilities and remove well paying jobs from the economy when that economy (Windsor’s economy) can least afford to do without the inputs. There’s a time for everything and everything in its time.
On a macro level wouldn’t you agree that by removing services from the market it also reduces competition and leads to increased prices to the consumer? That’s just basic economics.
What is your evidence that child care is something that government should do? Government only started doing it in Canada in a meaningful way less than 40 years ago.
And if you believe that child care is a core government service, what form should it take? Kibbutz style children’s houses, montessori, full day JK/SK?
I, like Dave, am not interested in a debate on child care specifically, but I don’t think it is sufficient to simply “assert” that some services are core to government and others are not without a robust overriding philosophy.
In the case of Scaledown, it seems to me that the overriding philosophy is that municipal government has an urban planning role that can guide decisions about development to improve the overall quality of life in a community. That is a pretty robust philosophy that can be endorsed by both ends of the political spectrum (leaving aside true libertarians of which there are none posting here.) The debate then occurs about what we mean by quality of life and how best to deploy goverment resources to achieve it.
I agree with Dave that we don’t want to go too far off topic, but some things need to be corrected.
The conveyance of a robust philosophy on anything cannot take place in an online forum. It’s just too awkward.
Yes Canada’s civil service is too big. That’s my point. But governments at all levels are engaged in activities where they have no business. Those areas should be cut back.
JK/SK is not and should not be used for daycare. The education system is for educating children and should not have as a goal to replace child care.
40 years of child care allowed the development of a system of best methods so that all strata of society to benefit from an accessible care system located where it needs to be. How many private day cares are in Glengarry or are planning to set up shop there? Or on College?
As for municipal government “guiding decisions”, where’s your evidence that that is happening with this mayor? Dictating decisions based on flawed and incomplete data, with zero consultation with stake holders, designed to achieve a secret agenda is the order of the day from Edgar.
LOS. Without going too far off topic. I don’t think gov’t should be in the child care business (personally that gets a bit creepy) or garbage p/u if a company can provide the same service at a better rate.
In fact our socialist Canada also has one of the highest amount of civil workers per capita in the western world and those services are not the most efficient (thanks Trudeau).
Kdduck, we have allowed business to do what they want and the outcome has become the donut effect. Without some type of help, not necissarily telling them where they go but give huge incentives toget them to go to the right places would help reverse this effect.
Dave, you and I will never be allowed to see the mayor’s “numbers” or criteria for deciding on switching garbage pick up. The true costs of pick-up will not be disclosed.
How much margin is available when Windsor’s current system is ranked number two for cost effectiveness? That pencil has to be pretty sharp for that to happen. But when looking at the mayor’s track record do you have the confidence that Windsor will benefit from this change or that friends and associates will benefit?
I do agree that incentives to business to is what’s needed in the downtown, but those incentives are not part of the official plan and not supported by other downtown proponents.
I agree with Los on the issue of garbage pickup. I think if the union is willing to make those workers an essential service and not have the right to strike, thus terrorizing our city, then being ranked #2 in the country for cost effectiveness will be tough to beat. Also, this will eliminate the threat of a corporation taking over and having their own union who could strike in the future leaving Windsorites helpless again.
With regards to Daycare; it doesn’t take a study to realize what the market is paying for labour and what the city is paying for the same labour. Something has to give. Either the union agrees to cut its wages by atleast a third or lose it. I disagree with alot of what Eddie does, but I think here, he made a very difficult decision which does nothing for his popularity, for the greater good.
Without taking a side, doesn’t the essential service designation guarantee arbitration which in turn guarantees wage increases far beyond the cost of living?
Unfortunately Mark, nothing is 100% perfect. This protects the citizens and businesses from what happened last summer. I wouldn’t want a union controlling the fate of this again without the designation. Also we were ranked #2 in cost effectiveness. Can’t we reward CUPE when they do something well? Let’s look at the ranking 5 years from now and if it slips, look at alternatives then. What’s the rush? I have been for the most part pretty pleased with the service at my house.
Mark, no. You’ve been drinking Eddie’s lemonade again. When arbitration commences the arbitrator(s) take into consideration the economic conditions within the municipality and the city’s ability to pay. Even that point has been conceded to by the Star. With all the money Eddie has been blowing on non-essentials (lawyers and consultants, monopoly games, and inflated costs of the WFCU Centre), arbitrators probably consider Windsor has the ability to pay increased wages. He doesn’t do himself or the city any favours when he returns strike savings and property tax reductions to the residents. An election year is a double edged sword.