As a homeowner in Orléans, whether you’ve been here for a while or are brand new to the area, you probably have what feels like a pretty reasonable expectation of home ownership here. You pay a *significant* amount in property taxes, and in return, you expect a certain level of service: roads that are smoothly paved, water and sewer pipes that don’t just up and break, and regular, rapid snow clearing in the winter. For decades, this has been the basic deal of suburban life. It comes with a few nice perks and privileges, but you pay your fair share and get city services in return. However, many of us are now sensing that this deal is beginning to fray at the edges. We see potholes lingering longer and repaving getting pushed back further and further. We hear about budget shortfalls, and yet we feel the steady rise in taxes that doesn’t seem to correlate with an improvement in services.
Where is the Money?
The question is, why? Why does it feel like our communities are struggling to keep up? The easy answer is to blame a specific council or a particular budget decision that is leading us to spend wastefully or on the wrong things. The true answer, however, is far more fundamental and is the mostly unspoken secret of municipal finance across North America. The suburban development model—the very way we have built our communities for 70 years—is a financial bait-and-switch, a money trap we’re currently sinking deeper into. The low-density, car-dependent neighbourhoods that define the majority of our sprawling city do not generate anywhere near enough tax revenue to cover the long-term cost of their own infrastructure.
The unspoken truth is that despite the thousands of dollars you pay in property tax each year, the municipal cost to service your property—to maintain the roads, pipes, sewers, and emergency services that connect you to the rest of the city—is substantially more than your bill. For decades, we have all become accustomed to a subsidized suburban lifestyle without ever having to confront the municipal math that makes it possible. But when you run those numbers, a stark reality emerges: at the typical low density of a suburban neighbourhood, residential property taxes (on a per-acre basis) would need to be significantly higher to cover the full, long-term costs of the public infrastructure that each home relies upon.
The way I would hope this would play out wouldn’t mean everyone in Ottawa paying way more in property tax, but it would mean that owning a single-family home in the way many of us do now should be MUCH more expensive than it currently is. We owe it to ourselves to come to terms with this fact and start to collect enough property tax from a given lot size and density to actually cover the costs for a given area.
How Did We Get Here?
My journey down this socio-economic rabbit hole wasn’t academic; it was personal. It started with a frustration in raising a family in a suburban environment that felt isolating and wildly inefficient. This examination of why things are the way they are slowly but surely led me to the work of the Strong Towns movement. This group provides a powerful, non-partisan, and data-driven framework for understanding the core financial problem our city faces. Ottawa has its own local chapter of Strong Towns, consisting of dedicated volunteers who aim to apply these principles locally to help the city to grow in a sustainable and manageable way.
The central, and most challenging, idea is that the modern suburban development pattern is fundamentally a pyramid scheme. However, in this ‘scheme’, rather than the mayor or city council serving as an unwitting figurehead raking in boundless profits, car companies (and to a lesser extent, again somewhat unwittingly, construction companies) are really the main financial benefactors of the system. This system works so well for car companies because exclusive zoning—the practice of legally separating where we live from where we shop, work, and play—creates a mandatory dependency on their product.
When homes are clustered together, while businesses are mostly completely separated from residences, it can feel like the only way to connect people to places they want to go is with increasingly large, high-speed arterial roads. We are then forced to spend even more billions in public money to build and maintain this sprawling road network, which in turn creates a captive market. In this environment, owning a car ceases to be a choice and becomes a non-negotiable ticket to participating in the economy and society. This precarious, car-dependent system, paid for by taxpayers, creates a guaranteed, multi-trillion-dollar revenue stream for an automotive industry that bears none of the long-term infrastructure costs. And don’t even think about public transportation being a financially viable alternative for cities to cover suburbs with more transportation options, there isn’t enough density or logical routing options to make for really good transit in the suburbs.
How Suburban Development Works (and Then Stops Working)
The initial fees (development charges) from a developer and the first wave(s) of property taxes from a new subdivision on the edge of town create a short-term illusion of growth (and wealth) for the city. But this is not a repeatable or sustainable cash injection. The city, and its taxpayers, are left with the multi-generational cost of maintaining and replacing the vast, dispersed infrastructure required to service that new growth. And when this new growth is mainly low density housing, existing property tax rates don’t even come close to making up the funding gap. This isn’t particularly obvious either, something that isn’t clear until a few suburban expansion cycles, when maintenance bills on older suburbs start to come due.
To understand why, it can help to look at what Strong Towns calls “land use efficiency”. This is a simple measure of how much tax revenue a piece of land generates per hectare. When you apply this lens to Orléans, the picture becomes clear. A commercial artery like St. Joseph Boulevard, with its single-story buildings surrounded by vast parking lots, generates a tiny fraction of the wealth needed to sustain the public infrastructure that services it. Compare this to denser mixed-use urban developments like in Centretown, and it’s easy to see why single-family homes and businesses with massive mandatory parking lots can’t cover the city’s infrastructure bills. This is why building more densely isn’t just a lifestyle choice; it’s a fiscal necessity.
Support The New Orleans
The antidote to this cycle of unproductive growth is to build incrementally, the way financially healthy places have for centuries. In an Orléans context, this means embracing “gentle density” everywhere. Legalizing a duplex or larger multiplex on a residential street or allowing a corner store to open are small, low-risk, productive investments that strengthen a neighbourhood from within. These moves are currently not only illegal, but are often demonized by local residents, usually for reasons that don’t really hold up all that well to scrutiny. It’s one thing to say you don’t like the way a building looks or fits into the neighbourhood, it’s another to use that reasoning to vocally oppose anything being built or changed at all.
This approach absolutely extends to our transportation network as well. The “Less Car” philosophy isn’t about being anti-car; it’s about building a resilient community where you don’t have to drive everywhere by diversifying our transportation toolbox. Making it safe to walk or bike by building “complete streets” on roads like St Joseph Boulevard isn’t just a social good; it’s a fiscally prudent move that reduces the demand for massively expensive road expansions. Other roads like Jeanne d’Arc or Orleans Blvd are roads that tie our communities together, but at present they only do this for drivers. On foot or a bike, these wide boulevards actually serve to sever communities from one another, especially for kids or people who are less comfortable sharing road space with vehicles.
The suburban development pattern is not an accident; it is the result of specific policy choices made over decades. By understanding this hidden math, we as residents become empowered to challenge the official narrative. Learning and sharing these principles to help people understand what we’re facing, and how the suburbs have been subsidized by more productive urban communities for decades, is crucial to facing and addressing what’s coming. It is the first step toward demanding a more resilient and prosperous future for our community.
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