The show Investigation of October 21 revealed that the municipality of Saint-Lin – Laurentides was grappling with a water supply problem. The wells, which supply the aqueduct network, are not enough to meet the growing demand generated by the proliferation of residential projects. It is because the population of the municipality, which was 12,379 inhabitants in 2001, is today just over 23,000 inhabitants.
This growth is attributable to the fact that urban sprawl, far from having ended, now extends beyond the perimeter of the Montreal Metropolitan Community (CMM). The causes of this dynamic are multiple. The cost of home ownership is certainly a big part of it. Among our neighbors to the south, the adage ” drive until you qualify »Reflects the situation in which many households find themselves who have to resign themselves to moving further and further away in order to be able to acquire a home at a cost that suits their borrowing capacity.
But the postponement of residential developments to increasing distances from the heart of the agglomeration is also explained by the deconcentration of employment which has been underway for several decades. The most recent data indeed show that internal work trips to the suburbs of the metropolitan region have experienced a significant increase and that a significant number of these now concern municipalities outside the CMM.
About 70% based on property tax, municipal taxation is also a significant part. The relative share of property tax in relation to revenues somehow galvanizes the propensity of municipalities to welcome new developments, all too often regardless of their short-term viability. This approach can have unfortunate consequences on municipal finances and on preferred avenues of development.
The case of Saint-Lin – Laurentides illustrates this. For want of having measured the consequences of the real estate frenzy, in particular on water consumption, and due to the desire to contain the tax burden on owners, the municipality has simply not given itself the means to tackle to the problem. Also, according to the mayor, it should welcome new developments to cover the costs of improving the water supply network.
In other words, new residents will have to pay part of the bill for the work required to correct a problem for which those who came before them are in part responsible, even if it is their defense.
In a text published in 2013 in a collective work he edited – Dreaming Montreal: 101 ideas to revive the metropolis – François Cardinal maintained that this practice, moreover very widespread, was akin to a Ponzi scheme, named after the fraudulent stratagem invented by Charles Ponzi in the 1920s. In its original version, the assembly consists of remunerating the investments of investors already involved by paying them the funds collected from newly recruited investors. The system is obviously doomed to collapse.
This allusion to the Ponzi scheme was not anecdotal. Much research carried out in the United States has indeed shown that a related mechanism has presided over the production of the suburbs for several decades. The purpose of welcoming new resident-taxpayers is to make them pay part of the bill that should have been passed on to previous cohorts. The mechanics are however quickly likely to jam due either to the saturation of the municipal territory, or to the strong competition that the municipalities engage with each other and which results in the opening of new urbanization perimeters in municipalities. who intend to have their piece of the pie.
However, this dynamic is encouraged by the interventions of the Quebec government which regularly subsidizes many works that were not budgeted by the municipalities or were knowingly omitted so as not to increase the tax burden and not to harm the municipal attractiveness.
This flippancy with which several municipalities “plan” their development explains why the viability analyzes of real estate projects which take into account all the costs of development are hardly popular in many municipal administrations.
At a time when the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing invites Quebecers to get involved in a vast project aimed at developing a national urban planning and land use strategy, it would be useful not to lose view this reality. If the Land use planning and development law, adopted forty years ago, must be “modernized”, it would be at the very least unseemly to attribute to its obsolescence what is rather a vision of the territory and a conception of development that is too easily accommodated. , despite the known pernicious effects of both.
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