Last Wednesday evening the municipality hosted a public engagement session regarding our Land Banking Program, and I think it went quite well. We had a few dozen people through, talking to Director Walsh, members of council, and of course the consultants from Urban Strategies Inc., to provide input into the project to shape it according to our values and vision. Now that they have a bigger sense of our vision for the land, the consultants can begin the process of designing a neighbourhood according to those values.
Despite having a very busy term with lots of new ideas and projects on the go, this is the thing that I am most proud of in this term, and most excited to see continue in the next! So let’s take a look at the project and the values that will guide it.
What is Land Banking?
Land Banking is the practice of purchasing land before you have a particular use for it, and holding on to it until the moment is right. In the investment world, it often refers to the practice of investors purchasing land and waiting for it to appreciate: land that is cheap today might be very valuable in the future, if the market conditions change. This is what was happening in the Greenbelt: developers had been purchasing protected land in the Greenbelt and just sitting on it, waiting for the moment when the province would change the legislation and allow those farms to become subdivisions. When Premier Ford declared that the province would remove Greenbelt protections in the name of affordable housing, those developers collectively stood to make billions (yes, with a B). Obviously this was a problem.
That’s not what we’re doing.
Municipal land banking isn’t guided by the principle of profit. Instead, we look to purchase land for its utility to the community. We’ve seen that the most utility for private developers in Brighton comes in the form of building more housing, which is fine (good, even!); but we know that Brighton needs more than just new housing if we want to have a characterful, walkable, workable, and livable community, and we should not expect private investors to provide those things for us at a loss. Individuals are not in a position to address the systems problems that lead to suburban sprawl, nor are they responsible for shaping the future of our community beyond building one subdivision at a time. If we want a different development pattern, we have to take a more active role in what gets built, and that starts with land.
We didn’t have any land suitable for development. So we bought some, and now we’re exploring how to make the most of it. In doing so, we’re incorporating six key values: Transformative; Embodying Brighton’s small-town sense of place; An inclusive mixed-income community; A vibrant, mixed-use community; Connected; and Environmentally, economically, and equitably sustainable. I’ve already talked about sense of place; over the next little while I’ll address the rest too.
The Need to Transform
On the surface, this project is our response to the housing crisis, and if all we did was build affordable housing it would be worth doing. But when you start to consider the knock-on effects of affordable housing, it adds a lot more value.
Consider the current profile of Brighton:
- We’re known as a “retirement town”, and indeed more than half of us are over 50, with a significantly higher rate of seniors than the provincial average
- We have a relatively low number of local jobs: our largest employers are in construction, and most new employers provide entry-level jobs in food services or retail
- People often complain that there isn’t much to do here
- 88% of housing in Brighton is ownership housing, with only 12% of housing being rentals and without much vacancy or turnover in those rental units
- There’s a 6+ year waiting list for deeply affordable (subsidized) housing in Brighton
- Average house prices in Northumberland were well over $700k last month, while the “affordable” level for the average household in Brighton is much closer to $300k
Some of those things are generalities, while others are stats, but after a decade of living here and almost four years on council I feel like this presents a good picture of the challenges we face as a community. Consider the results of this profile:
- If rental housing is hard to find, and if it takes more than double the amount of money most people in Brighton make in order to purchase a home here, then people who are from here are very likely to have to look elsewhere when they need to find housing
- The people who can afford to buy here, then, are likely to be established adults or even retirees, and population growth will happen primarily through new seniors moving to town or from existing families having kids – growth in the young and old, while people in the in-between demographics will largely be moving out
- If seniors are the largest demographic in Brighton, then services that cater to that population will continue to be the most viable: pharmacies and other health services (dentists, optometrists, and physiotherapists), legal services (for real estate, wills, and estates, all common among seniors), and boutiques aimed at that demographic
- Most of those professional services require advanced degrees, meaning they provide few employment opportunities for existing locals
- Younger people will continue to say that there’s nothing to do here, as the dominant demographic (seniors) are less likely to support nightlife, etc
- We have a reinforcing feedback loop: developers/builders are the largest local businesses, whose work largely brings more seniors to town, whose needs generate few other local jobs, which ensures that developers remain our largest local businesses
We could drill deeper on other aspects of the above, too. For example, young people looking for work will likely have to look elsewhere…but young people looking for housing will also have to look elsewhere. Someone lucky enough to have a job locally probably can’t afford to move out of their parents’ home with whatever wage they can make locally; and someone who moves away to find housing they can afford likely won’t keep a low-wage local job. Either way, Brighton doesn’t feel like a place that is for them. This is the story of many small towns, but it doesn’t have to be a given.
What if we could change that? What if current development patterns were not destiny?
One Transformative Development
One development can’t change everything about Brighton, and we wouldn’t want it to. But it can change some of the elements of the profile I sketched above, and those changes would have knock-on effects for the entire community.
- If we build more purpose-built rental housing, there could be more housing available for young people, and more opportunities for seniors to downsize into apartments too. This could allow for seniors to move out of the family homes they’ve owned for years, that are now too large for them to comfortably care for, freeing up those family homes for more families
- If we partner with the Northumberland County Housing Corporation to build Rent Geared to Income (RGI) housing units, the waitlist for affordable housing could be cut down significantly, which would allow us to prevent homelessness in Brighton without requiring residents to move away for affordable housing
- If we build more mixed-use neighbourhoods (which is to say, commercial/residential together, as we have on Main Street), we’ll have more opportunities for small local businesses. This can not only support more local workers, but it could be a pivotal part of a larger tourism strategy (especially given the hotel that’s being built in that part of town), which could mean that there’s more to do here
- If we partner with the Northumberland Workforce Housing Initiative we could support the people who work in Brighton but could not otherwise afford to live here – and if it’s a mixed-use neighbourhood, people could potentially even walk from their home to their workplace
- If we build a high-density neighbourhood, even those who don’t work in the same neighbourhood that they live in would be much more likely to be able to take transit to work. Transit reduces the amount of cars on the road, but it requires enough population density to support it and provide regular services. Having even one high-density neighbourhood could potentially serve to support regular transit routes into Brighton, making all of our community much more accessible, walkable, and safe
The current development patterns are the result of market-driven development: building a new subdivision is a relatively low-risk high-reward business that is shaped by market conditions (there’s plenty of demand for housing, particularly the big ones with big lawns), lender rules (it’s easier to get a pre-construction loan for a bunch of houses than for an apartment building), our regulatory environment (which is oriented around land owners doing what they want with their land, provided it is a legal use, rather than directing the development of specific things based on the needs of the community), and the needs of the developers themselves (who are trying to run a business and make a living, not take responsibility for all of Brighton being the best that it can be). None of those factors shaping the development world are going to change in the near future, so if we want the outcomes for Brighton to change, we need to change them ourselves. And with one development, we can change the environment enough that new opportunities will be unlocked for our collective future here.
I do want to point out that developers in Brighton have been making an effort to change these development patterns too. We’ve been asking them to build higher-density styles, such as townhouses and even stacked townhouses, and they’ve obliged. We’re seeing a bit of mixed-use development, too. My experience of developers is that they’re good folks who actually do care about the shape of the community, rather than as the cartoonish villains they’re often made out to be. But they generally don’t go through the level of planning that we’re undertaking for this project, or work at the same scale, and they can’t be expected to take on the same level of risk that we’re able to take on as a municipality in order to make something truly transformative. We have more time and money, and less need for profit, which allows us to do things differently, and therefore achieve very different outcomes.
A Good Investment
This Land Banking Program is something that is not usually on a municipality’s to-do list at all. I’m not aware of any other municipality attempting something like this, certainly not on this scale. Some would argue that municipalities should not do things like this: the typical capitalist perspective holds that public services should be kept to a minimum, which at the local level usually means fixing roads and picking up garbage. The free market is supposed to take care of everything else.
But as I hope I’ve shown above, the market has so far not provided us with necessities like affordable housing and transit, or the benefits of a walkable and inclusive community. For a lot of different reasons, the invisible hand of the market has let us down. If we want these things, we need to chip in together to make them happen, and that’s what local government is for.
We’ve already spent $3M dollars on this project, mostly just to purchase the land. That’s a lot, and feels like a lot. But let’s compare to our other major projects:
- Our wastewater treatment plant is budgeted around $52M
- Replacing our arena and curling rink would cost an estimated ~$35-75M, depending on what’s included, with a pool adding an as-yet unknown amount on top of that
- New roads cost ~$300k/km, and underground works required to service subdivisions are also incredibly expensive (as we’re seeing through the Prince Edward St replacement!)
All of these other expenditures provide us with depreciating assets that will someday need to be replaced again, and serve to facilitate everything that we already do. Which is to say that we spend millions of dollars annually on things that we rely on, but that are otherwise more or less invisible to us. Insofar as this infrastructure facilitates all of our living and working in Brighton, we get incredible value from them…but none of them are doing anything new for us (except the potential pool, which is likely the most expensive of all).
The land banking project, and the ambitious neighbourhood we want to construct, will open new doors for all of us, creating new opportunities for community and economy here. And one of the things that we’ve hired Urban Strategies Inc. to do is design a business model for this project that will result in the land being a long-term asset to the municipality, the proceeds from which can be reinvested in the community.
All of that said, this project is at the same time the most ambitious thing we’ve done all term, and relatively one of the cheaper ones with the most hope of return, both economically and socially. A good investment in our future!