Growth an investment in our city’s future

As everyone well knows in Regina, we have been experiencing several years of economic, population and community growth in our city. One of the most obvious and profound beneficiaries of this growth has been the residential housing industry and the more than 5,000 people who are directly or indirectly employed in the industry.

According to Statistics Canada, the City of Regina census metropolitan area, which includes the surrounding communities, grew by about 15,000 people from 2001 to 2010. Since then we have gained another approximately 14,000 residents in the Regina CMA. You can see the impact of this population growth in our housing starts. In 2001, Regina had 626 new housing starts. A decade later, 10,332 homes were added to the Regina area housing supply. Since 2011 (including our estimate of where we will end up at in 2014) 10,066 new homes have been added.

This is important for two reasons. Over the past year, there has been a fair bit of speculation the industry has significantly overestimated housing demand, resulting in “significantly higher new home inventory” as Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. stated earlier this week.

I would not completely disagree; there is some excess inventory for the short-term in the Regina market. What this means for home buyers is this could be a great time to look at some of the built-up inventory as an opportunity to purchase a newly built home. Looking back over the longer term, however, what has been demonstrated is the housing market does build close to the population demand.

The second reason our population growth numbers are important to understand goes to the heart of how our community feels about growth. I moved to Regina in 1991. That year was significant in the Regina housing market as there were only 189 new homes built that entire year. The city was almost at a standstill in terms of growth. I grew up in the boom/ bust cycles of Alberta, so I was not surprised to hear from friends and family in Alberta, “why would you move to Regina?” What I was not expecting was how my new colleagues and friends in Regina also asked me the same question, “why would you move here from Alberta?” In 1992, Regina and area was desperate for growth.

From my perspective, growth in our community is precious because of the far-reaching benefits. There is no doubt there are many factors that impact whether a community will grow or not. Many of those factors are out of local control. However, one factor is very much in the community’s control and that is growth occurs when it is sought.

Growth is not a penalty or imposition on the pre-existing city; it is a source of its ongoing lifeforce. New faces, new families, greater cultural diversity, greater economic investment refreshes our community and brings out new options. People who come to our community are assets, not problems; new people and growth, most importantly, add vibrancy and variety that enhance quality of life and the range of economic opportunity.

I was perturbed this week when the City of Regina deliberated on the one per cent dedicated mill rate increase for residential road improvement. Some chose to refer to this as a tax “caused by growth.” I wondered which growth horizon they were speaking about. Growth in the 1960s when Regina added over 40,000 people to the community? Or was it the 1970s when the city population grew by 27,000 or maybe they were referring to the 1980s when our population grew by 23,000? After all, it will be many of the roads built in those eras that will receive the benefit from this one per cent dedicated mill rate increase. It will not be Regina’s newest communities; they do not need road improvements as those streets are brand new. Yes, someday they will need to be repaired and the city will need to find a financial mechanism to repair those roads, but that is how cities work.

From an overarching economic perspective, growth does pay for growth in our community. For starters it adds to the expansion of our tax base, which the city, as a government, can use to finance ongoing infrastructure and service needs. It is faith in the future return on today’s investment that will truly determine whether our community embraces growth or deters it. Our civic government leaders, citizens, stakeholder advocacy groups like ours, right down to individual taxpayers, need to really understand what is truly important in our discussions and comments on growth. It is unhealthy and departs from what has made Regina a great city to focus only on the immediate. Such thinking shrinks the conceptual horizon to a closed-in and fearful approach, a naive perspective oriented only to preservation, instead of toward growth and its concomitant improvement in our quality of life.

In framing municipal policy for the future, the City of Regina and citizens will contribute best to the city as a community by acknowledging, internalizing and being driven by an outlook that growth is an investment in our city’s future and not simply portrayed as a possible cost borne by taxpayers today.