Here’s what I had to say about Winnipeg:

My home is a beautiful Canadian city with a fascinating history that’s killing itself slowly with sprawl infrastructure, as we lay pipes and build roads at the fringe while infrastructure at the city’s heart decays. We continue on this path, despite the fact that, as a community, we understand the value of older areas. Downtown revitalization, and the preservation of an architecturally stunning warehouse district, continue, and make progress, even as the streets and underground infrastructure deteriorate further. Winnipeg’s urban self-evisceration is its most pressing land use challenge.

That’s what I told the Planning Commissioners’ Journal, and that’s what I say to my fellow Winnipegers.

He’s looking ahead, as rural municipal officials and politicians everywhere should be. Here’s my response, more or less, to his query: 

In the cities I’m familiar with, your proposed 50 or 55-foot lot frontage would not be considered small – nor would it count as large. In many high-quality suburban subdivisions a lot frontage on the order of 40-45 feet would be standard. To be sure, many suburban lots are larger than that, and a largely rural area like your county might not wish to emulate the standards of big-city suburban neighbourhoods. For now therefore, I consider your proposal to represent a reasonable balance between long-standing habits on one hand and the need, on the other, to look to the future.

The future is bound to look different from the past. Some communities in your county are experiencing growth rates approaching 7 per cent. In a rapidly-growing rural or semi-rural area it’s important to bear in mind that there are cities in your future, and to consider how these cities can develop in a manner that will keep taxes down and maintain the pristine environment your residents enjoy now. Moreover, there is a growing consciousness, in society as a whole, of the importance of environmental sustainability to the future of our communities – a consciousness shared by the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association.

In light of those considerations, I offer the following comments on your proposal:

In the long run, wider lots mandate more vehicle miles driven, as well as more pavement and longer lines of underground municipal services. As any municipal council is well aware, infrastructure is expensive – a consideration that will become more important as urbanization gets underway. There is a long and unhappy history of municipalities undertaking ambitious programs of infrastructure expansion, only to find themselves unable to justify the property tax levels required to maintain the infrastructure. In many cities across North America, the end result has been crumbling streets and sewer lines.

In light of these realities, it seems counter-productive to maintain a planning regime that forces developers and prospective homeowners to build and maintain large-lot developments, when some of them might well prefer medium-sized lots. It is worth underlining that the proposed changes do not force anyone to do anything. They only offer the option of slightly smaller lots to those who might wish to take advantage of it.

In short, your proposals look reasonable to me.

In other words, diversity at street level will be replaced by uniformity. That’s what Jane Jacobs – a Torontonian who set the world of city planning on its ear – would be saying if she were still with us. In her classic Death and Life of Great American Cities, she argued…

…that the unique virtue of cities, and the singular secret of successful city neighbourhoods, was diversity. What makes cities and neighbourhoods great, she said, was that many people gathered in the same places for many different reasons.

This gathering of many people, on the street, in parks, in public squares or buildings, made these places lively and interesting. Liveliness in itself attracted still more people, who came to watch other people or be seen. We can see for ourselves how her theories come to life any evening in the spring or summer on the streets of Corydon Village and Osborne Village.

However, Jacobs – a believer in capitialism who didn’t wear rose-coloured glasses – saw a problem: A conflict between diversity and the automatic workings of free markets. Diversity attracts people while markets seek profit. On any diverse street, there are bound to be some businesses that are more profitable than others. Entrepreneurs understand that diverse, crowded streets offer opportunities to do business, and, as wise investors, they seek to invest in the most profitable opportunities.

As a result, lower-profit businesses tend to be bought out and replaced by higher-profit enterprises. The result is a paradox: The very diversity that made the street a good place to do business in the first place is crowded out by the pursuit of those business opportunities. As more profitable businesses buy out less profitable ones, diversity fades into uniformity and the street loses its attractiveness . That’s exactly what’s happening on Osborne Street.

By deciding in favour of the Shoppers expansion, the Board of Adjustment has agreed to the death of street-level diversity in part of Osborne Village. If this decision becomes a precedent for future decisions, it will herald the slow death of  the diverse Osborne Village we know – and perhaps after that Corydon Village. If the street traffic on Osborne is driven away by what Jacobs called the destruction of diversity, the management of Shoppers’ Drug Mart may yet have reason to wish that the Board of Adjustment had not been so pliable.

Apart from the obvious – the obscene juxtaposition of extreme wealth and dismal poverty – what exactly is rotten?

A good way to seek an insight into what has happened to American capitalism is to compare Henry Ford’s innovations with those of Walmart from the perspective of labour. Ford built an industry on technical innovation and the prosperity of labour, while Walmart has built a commercial empire on what, by Ford’s standards, is labour exploitation.

Ford’s achievements did not spring from a saintly nature. On the contrary, he was a mean-spirited crackpot. To cite only one example, he financed an American edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (follow the link, scroll down to 1920), a vicious anti-semitic forgery designed to persuade readers of the existence of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. But he was a brilliant crackpot. He had the kind of brilliance that makes it possible to penetrate to the essence of a problem and, in solving it, to defy conventional wisdom.

To understand what Ford did, we also need to appreciate that, until the end of the first decade of the 20th century, cars were expensive luxuries, carefully crafted by highly skilled trades people. There was a lot of hand work involved, and the idea of mass producing the kind of precision that it took to build a car seemed an absurdity.

But Ford thought it could be done. It was his idea that you could mass-produce an automobile if you did two things:

• Used assembly-line methods to produce it at a reasonable price.
• Paid the workers well, so that they’d be motivated to do their jobs well, and, more importantly, be able to afford to buy the cars.

Ford transformed the automobile from a luxury to a good ordinary workers could afford and, at the same time, made workers, who were used to sweating their guts out for a meagre living, into modestly affluent consumers. Beginning in 1914, when Ford introduced the eight-hour, five-dollar work day, jobs at Ford were the best industrial jobs anywhere.  A Model T  Ford could be had some years for less than $400.

The Model Ts sold like beer at a hockey game. The wages Ford paid its workers set a standard for industrial wages and laid the basis for a generation in which it was normal for workers with minimal skills, who were their families’ sole wage earner, to buy homes and finance good educations for their children.

Today, the standard-setter is Walmart, where employees are paid as much as a couple of dollars above minimum wage and, like many workers today, generally work less than full time. Though they are better paid than many in North America’s increasingly low wage economy, compared to 1950s and 1960s industrial workers, they are poor. The standard Walmart sets is not one of worker affluence, but of a hardscrabble existence, with greatly diminished prospects for young people.

Small wonder then that the “Occupy” protesters are angry. They are generally better educated than their grandparents and yet often face dimmer futures than either their parents or grandparents. Their situation is emblematic of a society that has lost its ability to innovate in such a way as to provide good jobs for ordinary people.

That’s not the whole story…

…certainly not in Winnipeg, where Wal-Mart left a large space in Grant Park Shopping Centre, located at the edge of a prosperous, inner-ring suburban community,  to move to a massive big box store farther out. That move, along with others that took place at the same time, fed off sprawl, and gave an extra push to the development of more sprawl still farther out.

Things worked out for Grant Park Mall, where a Canadian retailer, Zellers, took over the abandoned space, but they haven’t worked out for the taxpayers of Winnipeg and Manitoba who, as I observed in my last post, can’t afford to fix deteriorating downtown streets because so much is going into building new ones for the likes of Wal-Mart.

There’s no point blaming Urban Land or Wal-Mart for this. They’re just doing their jobs. The blame goes to taxpayers and governments who can’t work up the courage to ensure that the real costs of new streets, water lines and sewers at Winipeg’s edge and in adjacent municipalities are covered by development charges. Sprawl is killing the city slowly. Why are we subsidizing it?

Wayne Glowacki, Winnipeg Free Press

A few days later, the Winnipeg Free Press picked up the story and added some figures to show that the roads are continually getting worse and that the city isn’t anywhere near having the resources it needs to repair the streets quickly enough to keep pace with their deterioration.

Instead, the city has, in effect, given up on attempts to solve the problem. A public works official admitted to the Sun that the city’s priorities are shifting away from streets in poor condition to those that have not yet reached that state, on the premise that it is better to maintain what is viable than to salvage what is not. Since the streets in worst condition tend to be those in the poorest neighbourhoods, the neglect of downtown streets is tantamount to the ghettoization and decay so distressingly familiar in American cities.

Although it is claimed the city can’t afford to fix the old roads, there is always money available for new roads. And that is the nub of the problem. The city is spending so much money building and paving roads in the periphery that it can’t afford to maintain roads in older neighbourhoods. If Winnipeg hopes to accommodate its growing population without continually worsening its infrastructure deficit, it must do so, at least in part, by development within the the city, rather than at the periphery.

The reason fringe development worsens the infrastructure deficit is that the developers of new neighbourhoods are not being charged enough to cover the real costs to the city incurred by their developments. Part of the solution to the infrastructure deficit, therefore, is to raise development charges for new developments to the point where they are paying the bills incurred by these developments. Raising development charges to a sustainable level will reduce the incentive for sprawl development and correspondingly increase the incentive for development within the city.

A balance between edge-city and centre-city development that reflects the city’s real costs would not only be socially more just and financially more justifiable, it would make some money available to fix those roads.

As a result of these ideas, it’s common, in this country and across the continent, to regard cities as, at best, necessary evils, characterized by noise, dirt, crime and moral degeneracy: pornography, illicit drugs, drunkenness, violence, degenerate art and music – with the conception of what’s degenerate changing from time to time. I’ve seen it go from Elvis Presley to the Rolling Stones to the Ramones to hip hop – probably with a few stops in between that I’m forgetting at the moment.

The idea of what constitutes urban degeneracy keeps getting updated as fashions change. One version of rural fundamentalism is clothed in the garb of environmentalism. For example, David Suzuki was quoted some years ago as saying: We can’t eradicate cities. Nor would we want to. But we must recognize that cities disconnect us from nature and each other. They exist by draining resources from the planet while spreading toxic materials and debris. And if we regard all living things on earth as an immense supra-organism (which some have called gaia), then cities must be seen as the Gaian equivalent of cancer.

That’s one environmentalist point of view. There’s another that says the opposite, that cities, if they are properly developed and maintained are easier on the environment than rural life, because they allow for more efficient, and environmentally friendly sewage and garbage disposal, transportation, as well as heating and lighting.

In any event, rural fundamentalism has not only gained a new lease on life from one wing of the environmental movement, it’s part of our consciousness. Cities are something the majority of North Americans want to get away from. The growth of North American cities has been profoundly influenced by the fact that much of that growth has taken the form of attempted flight to quasi-rural environments at the city’s edge.

But maybe the final chapter hasn’t yet been written. In recent years,  a culture change seems to be underway. Though there’s undoubtedly still a strong majority of North Americans who prefer to live in conventional suburbia, or places in the country, today there are more people who like urban environments than there were 20 years ago or more.

Parties help us to nail down what prospective councillors actually stand for. The most important consequence of municipal non-partisanship is to make it easier for our representatives to conceal what they actually advocate.

Bart’s evidence shows clearly that, for the most part, candidates for City Council were backed by the personal contributions of people well-known to have strong ties to the Conservatives, Liberals, or the NDP. The way candidates raise funds for their campaigns, in his words, “defeat[s] the spirit of provincial election rules that ban union and corporate donations in municipal elections.

The tradition of municipal non-partisanship is a charade, and the law that tries to enforce it defies the reality that politics requires organization, but that’s not the point I’m pursuing here. My concern at the moment is the headline someone wrote for Bart’s piece in the Free Press, which targets “Team NDP” as being involved local in party politics, but lets Conservatives and Liberals off the hook by using the euphemism “Team Katz”.

That isn’t supported by the evidence in the article. What the evidence shows clearly is that prominent individuals connected to all three parties are involved in local politics, with the NDP dominant in the left-wing minority on council and the Conservatives  and Liberals dominant in the majority. There certainly is a Team NDP in municipal politics, but there are, just as surely, Liberal and Conservative teams.

In the city’s interest, Mr. Sheegl should perhaps be more concerned about the fallout from a positive decision. A series of studies covering Walmart and similar big box developments, summarized here, suggest that neither Mr. Wyatt nor Mr. Sheegl are taking a sufficiently critical look at this development proposal.

According to these studies, big box stores:

• Eliminate more jobs than they create.
• Are far more expensive to service than neighbourhood stores, and can actually produce a net loss of tax revenues.
• Offer less spin-off to the local economy, because they are less likely to purchase goods and services locally.
• Are not likely to increase the level of competition and consumer choice in the local economy – in fact, are likely to reduce it, by driving smaller businesses out of the market and subsequently raising their own prices.

Here’s the kicker: Requiring modification of big-box development proposals, or even turning them down, does not necessarily produce the untoward “developmental fallouts” Mr. Sheegl fears. On the contrary, there is good reason to believe that turning down big-box development proposals may have more positive than negative impacts on the local economy. All of this does not necessarily prove that this particular Walmart supercentre development is the wrong way to go. The real cause for concern is that discussion of the proposal focuses on details like trees and access, while apparently ignoring the wider implications of this development for Winnipeg’s economy.

This will not be the first time that Winnipeg has accepted development proposals without thinking through their implications, and, realistically, it’s unlikely that this will change in the foreseeable future, but it’s never too late to start. A growing number of cities are getting good results from a more critical approach to big box development. A good start would be an economic impact study that takes a serious look at the implications, and the alternatives. For a checklist of the kinds of questions City Council and city officials should be asking, click here, and go to p. 83.

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For more on the economic impact of Walmart developments, look up:

David Neumark, Junfu Zhang and Stephen Ciccarella. (2008). The effects of Wal-Mart on local labor markets. Journal of Urban Economics, 63 (2), pages 405-430.

For a study of Walmart and American culture, with obvious implications for Canadian culture, get:

Bethany Moreton. (2010). To serve God and Wal-Mart: The making of Christian free enterprise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.