I’m going to share a little about myself right off the top here before getting into this. My name is Rob, and I’m a husband, a father of three, and your neighbour here in Orléans. Like you, I chose to live here for the calm streets, the green spaces, and the shared sense of community. I’ve lived here for over 6 years now, and my family is here for the long haul. I love this place, and I want to see it thrive for generations to come.
This is a bit of a longer read, but if you’re willing to settle in and keep an open mind, I hope it will resonate.
That’s why I’m writing this. Recently (and frequently), I have read passionate discussions on our local Facebook groups about new developments in and changing landscape of our community. I’ve read the comments, and I hear (and share some of) the concerns loud and clear. There is a lot of worry about our neighbourhoods becoming dense and overcrowded (especially with car traffic), frustration that new housing isn’t affordable (preach!), and a sense that change is being forced on us by big corporate developers and the city, all while our quality of life hangs in the balance.
These are not concerns to be dismissed or disregarded. They are worth thinking about and talking through, and they come from a place of love for our community. I also don’t have all the answers, and there’s a lot of grey area the community needs to sort through to understand what’s in our mutual best interest.
So, I want to have an honest conversation. I’m not a developer, my only financial stake in the well-being of the community is the property taxes I pay and the services we get. I don’t work for the city, I volunteer with the local Community Association. My only goal is to ensure Orléans remains a wonderful, financially sustainable place to live. And to start, I want to lay my own bias on the table. After years of researching how cities work (and the ways in which they don’t), I believe that the best way to protect the suburban lifestyle we enjoy is to find ways to incrementally build more homes to welcome more neighbours into our community as it exists today, without sprawling further east or south. Not by building massive apartment or condo towers, but in ways that make sense and fit into each part of the community. However, I do believe that denser housing overall is a necessary component of this plan, however we go about it.
This article is my attempt to explain why I believe this, based on evidence and the unavoidable math of how suburbs are funded. My goal isn’t to tell anybody they are wrong (these are opinions, after all), but to share a different way of looking at the problem—one that empowers us, as residents, to choose the future we want.
Part 1: The Myth of the Self-Sufficient Suburb
A common and understandable point I’ve heard recently is that our suburban communities were doing just fine financially before amalgamation. The former city of Cumberland, given as the example, apparently had a healthy surplus when it joined the new City of Ottawa in 2001 (I do not plan to fact check this, but will take it as a given). The suggestion here is that Cumberland does fine on its own, and the dense downtown core is actually more expensive, and is the real financial drain for the city.
A Cumberland Tangent
I suspect, based on my research, that what happened here is that Cumberland was a fairly self-sufficient and mature city on its own, with relatively compact neighbourhoods, and it was managed in a fiscally reponsible way. Since amalgamation, however, the area around Cumberland (the east of the city that we now refer to as Orléans) has sprawled and been mostly filled with low-density single family home communities, built in a way that makes residents depend on their cars to get almost everywhere. The more compact and vibrant part of Cumberland that was sustainable and ran at a surplus has been picked apart and pulled at the seams over the years, drained of resources and surrounded by expensive sprawl.
The downtown core of the city continues to be its most productive part from a tax base perspective, but that doesn’t mean every part of the city should be covered in high-rise towers. However, there does need to be a balance where each area in the city should be responsible for pulling its own weight, and currently the urban wards closer to the core (pre-suburban neighbourhoods) absolutely subsidize the sprawl in all directions that our city has experienced over the decades since amalgamation.
This is what the urban planning organization Strong Towns calls the “Growth Pyramid Scheme,” and once you start looking for it, you’ll hear the slogan, “Growth Pays for Growth,” everywhere. It’s not a conspiracy, but an accounting illusion built into the suburban development model.
Here’s How It Works:
- The Initial Boom: A developer builds a new subdivision, sprawling the city further out on what was once green space, forest or farmland. The developers even pay for and install brand new roads, sewers, and water mains, along with additional development charges in some cases. The city annexes the area, and for the first 20-25 years, everything is great. The homes generate property taxes, and the new infrastructure requires very little maintenance. This creates a temporary cash surplus, which looks great on a balance sheet and gets municipal politicians re-elected.
- The First Bill Comes Due: Starting after about 30 years, that initial infrastructure reaches the end of its life. The roads need to be repaved or rebuilt (standards change, as do best practices for transportation infrastructure), the pipes start to fail (water main breaks, anyone?), the sewers need relining. The cost of this replacement is enormous—far more than the property taxes from that subdivision have generated over the decades, and more than they ever will generate without massive rate increases.
- The Scramble: The city is now in a bind. It doesn’t have the money saved to pay for these massive repairs. So, to get the cash, it must approve more new subdivisions on the edge of town. The development fees and initial tax revenue from this new growth are used to pay for the maintenance of the old growth.
This cycle is not sustainable. We are now living in that second phase, and overall you could easily say the city as a whole is fully in the third phase. The first generation of Orléans infrastructure is starting to age to the point of failure, and the cost to replace it is staggering. Any apparent surplus is gone, and the bills are coming due. We can’t build our way out of this forever, the math simply doesn’t work. The low-density layout that we love and have some to not only expect, but demand—single-family homes on spacious lots—does not generate enough tax revenue to pay for its own long-term maintenance.
Part 2: What “More Neighbours” Actually Looks Like
When we hear the word “density,” the minds of many in Orléans jump to massive, sun-blocking high-rises. This is a false choice. Forcing towers into established neighbourhoods is disruptive and really doesn’t create the kind of community fabric even the staunchest urbanist would want.
The solution is not high-rises; it’s what I usually call gentle density.
This means allowing our neighbourhoods to evolve organically, the way cities have for nearly all of human civilization, before strict, car-centric zoning was put in place (you may be surprised to learn that racism and classism played a large part in the introduction of exclusionary zoning laws, look it up!).
Gentle density in this context means allowing a duplex, a triplex, or a small, two-to-four-storey walk-up apartment building to be built on a lot that currently holds one or two homes. It also means allowing a corner store or a small café to open up within walking distance of peoples’ homes, since residential zoning restrictions also mean small businesses like this cannot operate a storefront that people could actually walk to. So much of our land in the suburbs is reserved as the exclusive domain of cars that we don’t even think about it, because we’ve designed our neighbourhoods so cars are an absolute necessity for almost everything.
Some parts of Orléans already do denser housing quite a bit, especially in the newer parts, but this still doesn’t change the zoning laws that make mixed-use development possible or likely, which would be an essential part of the conversation around a denser neighborhood that isn’t completely overrun by cars.
Tangent: Reframing Gentle Density
Building something like this where a family home once stood feels bad to some, because they are thinking about the family that won’t be able to live in the house that is being replaced. But this perspective fails to recognize that instead of that single family calling this place home, a small apartment or condo building, maybe with a small grocery store on the ground floor, means other people can live here. That could be grandparents who now don’t need to move out of the neighbourhood away from their kids. It could be a young adult who can move out of their parents’ home without moving across the city to gain some independence at an affordable cost. It could even be a doctor starting their career who wants to set up a practice in the community while they get established paying off med school debt.
It’s about creating diverse housing options that fit the scale of our community.
This approach builds community instead of disrupting it. It adds life to our streets, supports local businesses, and makes our neighbourhoods more interesting and accessible for everyone.
Part 3: The Real Impact on Our Wallets, Our Property, and Our Time
Let’s tackle the biggest concerns head-on. What does welcoming more neighbours in a gentle way actually mean for our finances, our property values, and our daily lives?
On Property Values: The most significant threat to your property value isn’t a duplex or small apartment complex being built down the street. It’s a municipality that can’t afford to fix the roads, maintain the parks, or keep the streetlights on. Well-designed and -considered, small-scale infill developments have a neutral or even positive effect on the property values of surrounding homes because they signal a desirable, improving neighbourhood. Think about the parts of the city with very high property values, these are places that have been and will continue to be redeveloped to increase housing supply and update housing that is already there. In addition, by increasing the number of taxpayers sharing the infrastructure bill, gentle density ensures the city has the funds to maintain the high-quality services that make our homes valuable in the first place.
On Affordability & Who Benefits: While a new duplex may not be “cheap,” adding any kind of new housing supply helps to slow the rate of price increases across the entire community. It’s simple supply and demand. More options mean less competition for existing homes. Furthermore, by legalizing more modest forms of housing, we open the door for smaller, local builders rather than just large corporate developers. And by focusing tax revenue more efficiently, we reduce the pressure on the city to chase big, disruptive projects. Overall, I don’t believe that the focus should be on creating ‘affordable housing’, but instead on incentivizing creating enough housing that housing in general becomes affordable (treating housing less like an investment).
On Traffic: This is the most counter-intuitive point. It feels like more people must equal more cars. But that’s only true if each household feels the need to have multiple vehicles, when everyone feels the need to drive for every single errand. When you have a neighbourhood with a corner grocery store, a bakery, and a pharmacy you can walk to, you eliminate lots of daily or weekly car trips. This is the concept behind walkable neighbourhoods, which plenty of municipalities (Orléans included) are building into future city plans. Studies consistently show that people in walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods drive significantly less than those in purely residential, car-dependent ones, which should be fairly obvious if you think about it. Our goal should be to build a community where our kids can walk to get a carton of milk—not to build more lanes and more roads to accommodate ever-increasing traffic.
Conclusion: Our Three Choices for Orléans
The math here is unforgiving. We can’t afford to continue to maintain our sprawling, car-centric lifestyle in its current form. This leaves us, the residents of Orléans, with a difficult but clear trilemma. We face three possible futures, and we must choose one:
- Significantly Higher Taxes: We can keep our community exactly as it is, with its low-density layout. But to pay for the massive, looming infrastructure replacement costs, every single household will have to pay drastically more in property taxes, year after year. We may be able to lean on the rest of the city to spread these increases out at their expense for a while longer, but eventually the bill will come due.
- Managed Decline: We can refuse to raise taxes and refuse to change our land use. In this scenario, we must accept that our services will continue to degrade. Roads will get worse, community centres and libraries will shorten their hours, and parks will be mowed less often as the city is forced to make impossible choices with a shrinking maintenance budget.
- Welcome More Neighbours: We can choose to share the burden. By allowing gentle, incremental density in our neighbourhoods, we add more taxpayers to the system without having to build more expensive infrastructure. This is the only option that allows us to keep taxes stable and maintain the high quality of life we all moved here for.
I believe the third option is our best path forward. It’s not about sacrificing our community for developers; it’s about making a smart financial decision to ensure our long-term prosperity. It’s about building a more resilient, connected, and vibrant Orléans for ourselves and our children.
This is a conversation we need to have as a community. Talk to your neighbours. Talk to your councillor. Get involved with your community association. Let’s choose our future together, with our eyes wide open.
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