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Two paths
There was a time not so long ago, that the County built homes at roughly the same pace as Quinte West. Those days are gone. For the past decade, new home building in our communities has been going in different directions.
In the first half of this year, Quinte West issued building permits for 200 homes (160 single detached, 8 semi-detached, 20 apartments and 12 townhomes). Prince Edward County issued just 78. Total. The municipality doesn’t offer a breakdown of housing types.
Quinte West earned $1.7 million from these new homes ($431,814 in building fees, $1,118,354 in development charges and $29,800 in parkland fees). The County, meanwhile, collected just $375,605 in the same period—for all charges from decks to commercial development.
The truth is, we don’t know what comprises the County’s permit fees number—there is no breakdown, no way for residents, or anyone outside Shire Hall, to know what type of development is driving a greater, or lesser, amount of fees. We don’t know if this includes parkland fees, development charges or anything else.
Like so many aspects of our local government, we are in the dark. We do know, however, that we are falling behind. And it is costing us much-needed revenue. Money that could be used to fix roads. Bridges. Waterworks. Town halls.
That is not all. Those 200 homes Quinte West issued permits for so far in 2019, will generate about $400,000 in new revenue for municipal coffers next year. And every year thereafter. Each is a new waterworks customer and a consumer of municipal services.
Here is the kicker: Quinte West’s population has increased over the past two census periods. The County’s population meanwhile has shrunk. In neither case are the numbers huge—but the direction is key. After another census is tabulated, these trends will be harder to ignore. Harder to see as an aberration. They will become defining characteristics.
We are told with the confidence only insiders possess, that a building boom is just around the corner—that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of homes in the hopper. To be built in the County. We are assured that the new homebuilding crisis will subside soon.
Maybe. But the numbers don’t tell that story.
Two years ago, the County reported that 1,700 new homes had received some level of approval. Yet, new housing starts have declined since then. We built 178 new homes in 2017, 159 last year and are on a pace to build 156 this year. Quinte West has seen 703 new homes built over the same period. That’s a difference of 210 new homes in just the last three years.
Meanwhile, infrastructure planners are readying the County for a massive building boom.
One chart highlights another hazard of ignoring real-world trends. Facts. On the ground. It is contained in the County’s waterworks master plan review, currently underway for Wellington. The graphic depicts the village’s population as a line on the bottom of the graph from 1920 to the present. Essentially a flat line. Roughly 2,000 folks for the past hundred years. But next year it takes a sudden and extreme upward turn into an indeterminate future. Extrapolating along the chart’s X-axis, the village population will rise to 8,600 in the next five or so years.
It won’t. Or, I should say, it is highly unlikely that our village will rocket from 170 new homes a year built in the County to 1,700 new starts in Wellington alone, in each of the next five years? Given the trends coursing through this community, it seems wildly improbable. As a planning tool, this chart seems about as useful as throwing a dart at the wall. Unless, of course, your ambition is to build massive new waterworks infrastructure. The old build-it-and-they-will-come plan.
We will return to the waterworks plan in another column. The point here is that this process serves as another impediment to new homebuilding. Meant to discourage and dissuade. Something we can ill afford.
We need new homebuilding in Prince Edward County. We need the revenue. The tax base. The user fees. Everything we consider as community touchstones demand fresh sources of funding. We need more folks to attend our schools. We need a growing population to attract funding for our hospitals and health care institutions.
Municipal costs are soaring. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Our population is shrinking. Fewer people paying more. That is a recipe for an increasingly unaffordable, isolated and decaying community.
We have the means and the opportunity to fix it. Tragically, we continue to dither aimlessly. Study. Review. Assess. Repeat.
For this, too, has a cost.
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