Technology

Infrastructure alone to Bungalow jungle is never cost-effective: as Detroit learned, it never pays for itself with property tax.

I say we jack the property tax on low-dense residential to properly reflect a 20-year amortization and all the operating expenses of the infrastructure used, all the way back to City Hall, so that it does pay for itself (and the farther out, the more expensive to fix, the more expensive the tax).

At the same time, the city will

• wreck a park (wait for it)
• put up 40 storeys of mixed use
• offer to buy the shitty bungalows around the building, with an option to buy into ready condo space
• same for businesses, because #mixed-use
• use adjacent bungalow space for central square. Start with transit station underneath
• build 7 more towers
• offer same buy-up to adjacent bungalows
• surround with greenspace and one really ineffective laneway to connect garages under building with roadway out there
• begin offering more incentives for bungalow people to give up their home for agri space and move into mixed-use
• repeat until city is transformed to efficient walkable oases linked by transit

People think they can't do apartments, but I'm sure a spacious 1200sqft place planned with an eye to sight-lines isn't what they're thinking. We love our (smaller) apartment near the mixed-use block that sprung up , and everything we need is within that block. From daycares and pet stores to restaurants and coffee-shops and take-out, and gyms (plural) and insurers and a market and a chemist and an insurer and a physio... it's endless, and they're still building out more commercial space.

But you have to build the new space, properly configured with GOOD (rail) transit, before you can get people out of their cars.