Capacity Building

In this third and final part of this blog series on my guiding principles, I will elaborate on Capacity Building. I know it sounds like broad nonsense, but it really sums up the category nicely.  In short, I want to increase the capacity we have for people. 

We know that there’s a housing shortage right now, so clearly we do not have the capacity to house our current population, never mind trying to accommodate any growth. Unfortunately, this Council likes to tout big numbers without actually understanding them. As a result, they boast about having ~18,000 housing starts in response to a population growth of ~65,000 people. They called it a record number of housing starts. Well, I can’t believe I have to say this, but unlike our Current Council representatives, I understand that people cannot live in a started housing project. If they could however, 18,000 homes is only enough for about 48,000 residents, based on the current Edmonton average of 2.6 people per home. If this Council knew how to ask questions, then they would’ve realized we need about 25,000 homes to accommodate 65,000 people. 

I look at the preceding figures and conclude that this Council failed to build appropriate housing capacity to match the needs of Edmontonians. 

On the bright side, their failure to meet the housing demand has saved us from a variety of different issues. As we densify, the demand for sewage and electricity grows. When the City decided where they wanted to encourage densification, they didn’t assess the infrastructure capacity of those areas. Communities that are on the cusp of their capacity are already starting to see sewage backups. I suspect it’s not too long before we start seeing brownouts in neighbourhoods. Greenspace, whether it be private lawns or public amenities, helps alleviate the demand for drainage by absorbing the water from high-volume storms. As we remove that in favour of densification, the capacity for storm sewers needs to increase. 

While we’re on the issue of greenspace, we need to consider if it’s appropriate for us to effectively give away surplus school sites for the purposes of densification. We know class sizes are crowded, so when we convert space that was designated for a school into housing space for families, we risk further reducing the capacity of classrooms. While building schools is not a municipal jurisdiction, we still have to service students through transit and we should be factoring classroom capacity when we choose to build or densify communities.

Another thing I want to focus on that is a need to our city - is to build capacity in the way we move people and goods. Roads, sidewalks, multi-use pathways, and yes, even bike lanes. Just to clarify, I dislike the bike lanes, but I recognize that there are parts of the city where bike lanes are suitable, along with a proper method to construct them. For instance, if 91 Street were to be widened, I would be in favor of adding bike lanes along with expanding the road capacity. However, I would oppose converting existing vehicle lane space into bike lanes.