Chapter 3 - Why your old neighbourhood (The North Shore) feels like it doesn't get new amenities while the new 'wealthy suburbs' do

AKA - why you need to be more YIMBY and less NIMBY in older areas.

Have you ever noticed how the oldest neighbourhoods seem to get the least love when it comes to City facilities and amenities? As a proud resident of the North Shore, I love our weird web of streets, the flat terrain making casual walking and cycling accessible and fun for people 8 to 80. But despite decades of City Plans promising reinvestment and despite decades of lobbying by residents - the North Shore is not getting bike lanes, or repaved streets, or sidewalks, or new street trees, or better road crossing, or traffic calming or other investments in community amenities. Most of the dilapidated homes and garages remain just as dilapidated, while the average price of a home has nearly doubled in 10 years. Instead, amenities like the public pools are removed, mature trees are cut down without being replaced, lots sit empty, and other homes continue to crumble in dilapidated state - while the City starts to follow the rest of the province, grappling with a earnest housing affordability problem - with half duplexes crossing $600,000. Meanwhile areas like Pineview get brand new, beautifully planted and maintained playgrounds, nature parks with walking trails and Aberdeen gets a new school, a new row of street trees, new parks, a new firehall...

But I would argue we are complaining about the wrong things. We complain about developers, and parking and traffic. But new development is what pays for those amenities, and I will lay that out now.

And as a quick note about Developers - their operating statements are directly influenced by the cost of materials and regulatory climate they operate in. If you want to be mad at anyone, find out the names of the people who own derelict buildings, who aren't developing them. Its the land owners who sit on sites for dozens of years that make the big wad of cash, developers building homes like restaurants build sandwiches - costs While I don't think we have much power to influence the cost of materials, we do have the opportunity to shift the regulatory climate in order to achieve the investment we want in our community, and improve the affordability of housing at the same time.

I am going to first illustrate what I mean by saying that the North Shore doesn't get the love that newer, suburban areas do -  then I am going to explain some of the major reasons why that is the case - and then finish in Part 2 with what adjustments and compromises that I see that home owners and residents as well as regulating bodies need to make if we are to seriously address many of the issues of the built environment - from blight to safety to property values and affordability. So basically make an enemy of everyone all at once.

----------------

Let us start by comparing the amenities of MacDonald Park to Orchards Walk, a new periphery development at the end of Valleyview. I am picking on Orchards Walk mostly because I actually think from a planning point of view, its mostly really great. It has alot of things I think we would like on the North Shore. Orchards Walk has a variety of housing styles and price points, a place for everyone, from the seniors home, to apartments big and small, duplexes, townhomes, small and large single family homes - rentals and ownership. Orchards Walk also features great access to nature areas and trails close at hand. It has bike lanes and a number of commercial services walking distance away. Pineview would mostly check the same boxes, but in any case - check out some photos;

Interestingly, some of the design details that I pick up on in Orchards Walk that make it so great are currently illegal by City Zoning to build on the North Shore. For example, you can see in Orchards Walk that the 15km/h roadways can be as narrow as 16-8" however when asking for narrow roads and traffic calming on the North Shore, we instead get renovations like this highway on Oak that has created a high speed and dangerous road through what was formerly a much narrower and slower road. 

The posted speed limits, of 15km/h, in Orchards Walks are enforced easily through the traffic calming built in to the area, the narrow lanes, bulb outs at intersections, street trees, formalized on-street parking, speed bumps and other traffic calming measures. All these things make these streets safe for young children to be out kicking a ball. But on the North Shore, the most affordable area in the city for young families, doesn't get that sort of treatment. It gets pot-holed roads, with no sidewalks, and wide lanes with no center lines that increase speeds of cars, and they are designed this way. As you can compare below, the Cities "Design Criteria Manual" does not even allow for streets on the North Shore to be designed below as posted speed of 50km/h despite the fact that initiatives like Vision Zero, and the National Association of City Transportation Officials Urban Street Design Guide, all say that any local roads should be designed with design speeds below 30 km/h. In fact the Cities Design Criteria Manual sites the Institute of Traffic Engineers, Traffic Engineering Handbook as a source, which itself recommends roads designed below 30km/h in residential areas.

Orchards Walk 15km/h Street:

Design Guide for North Shore:

Another consideration; in Orchards Walk pretty streetlamps have been installed, at tight intervals, giving plenty of light to the sidewalks and street. The sidewalks (which actually exist here) also get lots of light on them making them feel safe. Consider instead the quality of lighting on the North Shore, with no sidewalks, and broken pavement on the average streets. On the Oak Road update, we got new pavement and a sidewalk on one side, but certainly no fancy lamps. OR consider the lighting 'upgrades' that the City installed on Tranquille in 2013. Utilitarian, the Tranquille Lighting Upgrades succeed at somewhat lighting the road for cars, but keep the storefronts and sidewalks in the dark. As a result, pedestrians are often waiting at legal crosswalks for many minutes, as the drivers simply speed by, as they cannot see the pedestrians at all in the dark. Some streets like Clapperton lack illumination almost entirely. Almost all streets lack sidewalks, but are currently pretty narrow, so are pretty slow. But every new sidewalk comes with a wide road - the opposite of what Orchards Walk or Pineview is getting in family oriented residential - and the opposite of what the public has asked for in planning documents going back to 2004.

Orchards Walks fancy lamps, sidewalks, narrower roads, cross walks, etc. 

North Shore - almost no Street lights, no sidewalks, broken pavement, high vehicle speeds

It would be easy to lambaste the City of Kamloops for the state of things. Unfortunately its not that easy, and its really not their fault. First of all, the City only has so much budget and capacity to maintain things. Of the cities total income from all sources of $228,371,000 in 2018 - 6.5% was budgeted towards streets - that includes line painting, snow removal, replacing lightbulbs, fixing potholes, but also, adding sidewalks, and that sort of thing. Of the cities now ~1600km or so of maintained lane KMs, that gives each KM of road-lane in Kamloops about $9,277 per year to maintain it. Based on the block of Alexander Ave shown below as a 'typical' North Shore block of 150m, each block gets about $2,400/yr to maintain. 

That doesn't even cover the cost of a single one of the ornamental light posts we saw in Orchards Walk; you would still have to pour a concrete footing, hire an electrician to install it, run the power to it, and pay for the power. With most of Kamloops covered with low density homes, and few mixed use areas, the tax income from the City does not come close to generating enough income to actually maintain anything, in any of the neighbourhoods, including new ones. (More on that here)

Consider those light posts in Orchards Walk - the City of Kamloops has not paid for those. This is the single most important thing to remember when looking at the fantastic amenities in all new developments. The street trees, the bike lanes, the sidewalks, the grass, the art, the traffic calming. This is all paid for by the developer building the development, and built into the cost of the homes for sale and rent. New development is what pays for all these amenities. These neighbourhoods too, when they need maintenance in 30,40,50,60 years - will also be suffering from the lack of maintenance dollars that the City is able to put aside. This fancy stuff is not paid for with taxes. Its paid for by the developer, who then passes on that cost to the homeowners, who pay for it with higher home prices.

In Orchards Walk, the new residents even get this for their community center;

Compare that to MacDonald Parks community center - money can't buy those mature trees, but there is a rather large discrepancy in the quality and maintenance of the building;

So to summarize thus far, there is not alot of money in the kitty for maintenance and investment, and the new shiny things that new burbs get, are not paid for by the City, they are paid for by the developers.

For the City, the lack of $$ available for maintenance is further complicated. First of all, Municipal Corporations (like the City of Kamloops) are very restricted by Federal, and especially Provincial regulations and laws: by the BC Community Charter, the 1979 Municipal Act and the 1996 Local Government Act - plus of course the Local Government Grants Act, Assessment Act, Building Act, Environmental Management Act, the Motor Vehicle Act not to mention commitments to the Regional District, Department of Forest Land Natural Resources & Oceans or the Union of BC Municipalities. The list goes on and on. In fact, without provincial approval, local governments aren't even allowed to exist, an issue that is playing out in courts in the Lower Mainland and Ontario as we speak.

In addition to the voters, tax payers and councilors, the City of Kamloops staff and regulation is also responsible and accountable to all sorts of Agencies, Ministries and don't forget Unions. The City is severely restricted in how they are allowed to collect and spend taxes, what kind of grants can be applied for from higher government and how it is allowed to be spent, and how it has to be accounted for, what type of engagement needs to happen before a decision can be made, what types of notices need to be posted, what legal right of ways, permissions, statues and precedence need to be taken into account and what sort of person and job description actually appropriately reflects the job which needs to be done.

Now consider all this in the context of a development like Orchards Walks. All aspects of it are new, new roads, new lights, new right of ways, new business licenses, new buildings, new everything. There is little to no neighbourhood consultation. In addition most of this work is undertaken by the Developers and handed off to the City completed, so the City doesn't need to wade into that quagmire of regulation itself. Many times, the streets don't even hand off to the City, they are retained as private roads as part of bare land stratas, which is the case in Orchards Walk. From a legal perspective, the regulation for new developments on former farmland and periphery areas is light, lean and predictable. The development itself is designed around the regulation. It is also cheap. The land is cheap, and it comes with hardly any encumbrance. The opposite of mature neighbourhoods like the North Shore. the North Shore has nothing that "conforms" to modern zoning or codes, and every project is regulated individually, and the land already house a house on it - making it all really expensive.

Doing anything in an established neighbourhood in the first place, is to confront a wall of Nimbyism, mired opinions, politics and contradictory regulation. When a Developer wants to put in a 18' wide road or a row of townhouses in a new area - its relatively easy to do.  Conversely, when a roadway in an existing area that has been around for decades or more, used by hundreds of different user groups, adjoined by dozens of properties with dozens of owners and renters, with existing traffic, existing accesses, existing fire hydrants, signals, pipes, conduits, signage and use patterns - getting this done in existing areas is much more complicated, regulated, political, and above all, much more expensive. And we already know there is no money.

---------------------

So lets summarize a little bit. New Development is what pays for amenities, both new and upgraded - either through direct developer contributions or DCCs. Yes the City does have a budget for maintenance, but its not nearly enough to do the job that a City is regulated itself to do. Moral of the story here - if residents, business owners and patrons of the North Shore want to see dilapidated buildings fixed up, we need to be more Yimby than Nimby. Love or hate new development, with political will or not, the City is not going to be able to refresh, upgrade and maintain the North Shore and other older neighbourhoods unless new development is able to come in and pay for most, if not all of it. If you want sidewalks, street trees, safer parks, better lighting, better transit, more efficient green infrastructure, it gets paid for with new development. If you want that energy hog of an uninsulated shack made efficient - it has to get paid for somehow, and maintaining anything resembling affordability means its going to have to get developed.

And 5-15 years behind the North Shore now is Valleyview, Lower Sahali, Powers Addition, Brock - the deferred maintenance creep and dereliction is inherent to the financial cycles, and no neighbourhood will be immune. 

I will shortly follow up with a Part 2 - an implementable vision for the North Shore, aligning with the community planning documents, and a guide for would be developers wanting to invest in what makes this area so wonderful. A bunch of reasons, that given the right incentives, we can make the North Shore better with every project - nothing to worry about! And besides, some new housed residents could only do good things, and if the statistics and projections of infill in every other city in North America hold, most of them will bike, walk and take transit, making our streets safer and relieving, not adding to the traffic burden. But more on that in other articles.