Comment by 9oliYQjP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 9oliYQjP | Hacker News Reader

Woah woah woah. I live in Toronto. Mississauga is a suburb. They got out of debt by getting into bed with developers who went wild with unrestricted development. All this wouldn't be out of the norm if the mayor's son wasn't a developer and she had excused herself from meetings involving the city and his company. But she failed to disclose the conflict of interest and her son's company benefited. Mississauga is now a textbook case of traffic gridlock, is starting to experience high violent crime (because all the families that moved their in the 1990s now have teenagers with nothing to do), and it is on track to lose its debt-free status as of 2012.

http://www.mississauga.com/news/article/507414

Hurricane Hazel is definitely a character though. I don't disagree with everything she's done but I've always been particularly skeptical of how she ran the city's books because I figured that it was unsustainable and the population would eventually have to pay. The developers helped build out their infrastructure but now that the development boom has matured there, the tax payers are left having to maintain it. It will cost them and I expect they'll run deficit budgets for much of this decade.

Additionally, being part of the lower class in Mississauga is probably one of the worst places in Canada to do so - public transit is practically non-existent, the city is a gigantic, congested network of ultra-wide boulevards. It is impossible to survive there without a car, thus further depressing the income of working class people.

Mississauga is a textbook example, IMHO, of a city gone wrong. It is the best Canadian example of the nightmarish, identical suburbia. Zero investment in infrastructure, absolutely no effort put into mass transport (despite being one of the most populated areas of Toronto)... of course you're running a surplus.

As compared to Toronto proper - a city with proper, extensive transit coverage, numerous financial woes (like any other city), yet a haven for working class folk.

Putting a full set of electric buses on those streets would still leave a big chunk of that $700mil in the bank.

Mississauga Transit has a current active bus fleet of around 410 buses. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississauga_Transit#Bus_fleet

And if you go there and ride them (I have), you will realize how pathetic 410 buses is for the level of population Mississauga supports. Even arterial routes are often only once per half-hour, once and hour is depressingly common, and service levels are just really, really poor. It's truly one of the worst public transit systems I've ever had the displeasure of using. If I was too poor for a car in Mississauga my life would be terrible indeed.

Thanks for explaining this. I knew there had to be more to it than the author's free-market ideology.

I am a fan of design first. If it is a community failure, than so be it. However, there is certainly something to be said for not passing on debt to your kids. As both an aspiring planner and a father, I appreciate communities that seek to be as neutral as possible with their finances. Peace.

How does a development boom burden tax payers? Were there no business created in the "unrestricted development?" It stands to reason that a healthy business climate generates tax revenue, instead of increasing the taxes of existing tax payers.

No - they were mostly just housing suburbs. That brings in income from fees when the houses are built - but you have roads, sewer/water, schools, hospitals to fund forever.

That's fine as long as the people living in those houses are tax-profitable middle class dual income. As soon as they aren't you have just built a 500,000 person slum to fund.

To my understanding, the financial picture of North American cities is essentially driven by public employee salary and benefit costs, which are out of control due to unions.

Whether a city is struggling or not right now, or will struggle in the future, is largely a question of how high they let the payroll and pension benefits drift.

rfghjhbg said it best. They did attract a few big businesses. Microsoft Canada has their headquarters (I believe that's what it is) in Mississauga. But they did so with the lure of unsustainably low taxes on these businesses. What's worse is that for the most part, there's not enough work in Mississauga itself to sustain its population. So a huge percentage of its population works in Toronto and surrounding cities.

Fundamentally, Mississauga depends heavily on Toronto for the jobs of its population as the manufacturing businesses it attracted are hurting right now and never could sustain the huge population.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm bashing Mississauga. Toronto created this phenomenon of commuter ghettos by ignoring the living needs of middle class families through most of the 1980s and 1990s. Toronto also let just enough businesses escape to these outer suburbs through high taxes, to make it seem like a feasible option to move out there. So people did, but most of the jobs that a professional who lives in these communities works at are still in Toronto itself.

For the most part the only thing keeping downtown Toronto itself from being a mess is that it's the financial hub for Canada. This sphere of influence is not necessarily permanent though and I worry about this city a lot. Alberta is where a lot of the resources are and it would make sense for the financial sector to be there. We like to poke fun of Albertans because they have all their eggs in the oil basket. But right now Toronto has all its eggs in the banking basket. It's a very fragile proposition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com