Municipalities charge development fees on newly constructed buildings under the rationale that growth should pay for growth. If your new home requires new infrastructure, it’s only fair to chip in, right?The NP Comment newsletter from columnist Colby Cosh and NP Comment editors tackles the important topics with boldness, verve and wit. Get NP Platformed delivered to your inbox weekdays by 4 p.m. ET.
Municipalities have justified these extraordinary increases by pretending that the cost of development-related growth has commensurately increased. As you might surmise by the numbers , they’re lying. HOW MIGHT I SURMISE THIS? The winners of this scheme are established homeowners, who tend to be older, wealthier and whiter than the average population. The losers are, as usual, younger Canadians and immigrants.
It’s bad enough that older Canadians sabotaged the housing market, they now want younger Canadians and new immigrants to provide them with de facto tax breaks, paid for by breathtaking development charges which happen to make housing even more unaffordable. It’s absolutely vampiric.
More hot garbage for the NP
So not only did he give away the environmental legacy to developers, he's reducing costs for them, and still not solving in any meaningful way the cost of rent, or housing in the places where it's needed the most. Just pouring money outside of cities to developers.
So in your opinion those fees that are a regular part of the building profession prevent builders from building? But the fees are necessary to connect services to the various grids? So communities should pick up those fees instead? Not the buyers of the properties?
He is giving his mob developers more. Start looking at the money trail.