Latest news with #citydevelopment
Daily Mail
21-07-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Ex-Giants player attacks Democrat Minneapolis mayor candidate compared to Zohran Mamdani
Former New York Giants player Carter Coughlin has launched a savage attack on the Democratic party 's Omar Fateh, who is running for mayor in Minneapolis. Coughlin grew up in Minnesota and played for the Golden Gophers, based in Minneapolis, during his college football years. Coughlin said Fateh's policies of rent control and raising minimum wage would set Minneapolis back years in an impassioned message on Sunday. He also debated Fateh's credibility to become mayor with his followers. 'In a city that has endured unimaginable destruction and racial tension, these policies would set Minneapolis back another 10 steps,' Coughlin wrote. 'MPLS (Minneapolis) needs rebuilding, and this will do the opposite. Pray for wisdom.' In his replies, the 28-year-old Coughlin clashed mostly with people who supported Fateh's rent control policy. 'I'd encourage you to take time to look into what rent control does to city development years down the road,' he wrote back to one follower. 'No one wants to build, to grow, to improve because the economics don't work. Subsidize low income housing and provide tax funding for those specific developments.' In a different response, Coughlin said: 'Designated low income housing by definition is rent controlled, which is great. 'Applying rent control to the entire city gridlocks all development. The city deteriorates. These policies only 'fix' the symptoms, not the actual problems.' His comments come after Fateh received an endorsement from the Democratic Farmer-Labor party. The Somali-born Fateh, 35, became the first Somali-American to be voted into the Minnesota Senate in 2020 and his policies have seen him draw comparisons to Zohran Mamdani, the 2025 Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York. After his college days with the Gophers, Coughlin was picked in the seventh round of the 2020 NFL Draft by the Giants. In his first season, he recorded his career sack on none other than Tom Brady. He went on to play 55 regular season games from the Giants from 2020 until 2023 but last year, was on the practice squad.
Globe and Mail
19-07-2025
- Politics
- Globe and Mail
When cities keep doing the wrong thing
At the Crossroads of Canada, people can once again cross the road. Barriers that stopped pedestrians in Winnipeg from walking across the intersection at Portage and Main for nearly half a century were recently removed. It was an overdue decision, and a reminder that cities shouldn't wait to be forced into doing the right thing. In plenty of places, the right and obvious decision that will build a better city is put off as politicians avoid hard choices. Paraphrasing a sentiment apocryphally attributed to Winston Churchill, cities often do the right thing only after exhausting all other possibilities. The small-town mayor in the movie Jaws stands out, even 50 years after the movie's release, as a fictional epitome of this civic myopia. He is determined to keep the beaches open in spite of a marauding shark. Viewers will recall that a young child gets eaten as a result. Only then were swimmers kept out of the water. In less gruesome ways, that mayor's instinct to try everything but the obvious is equally common in the real world. The benefits of opening Portage and Main have long been clear. It will knit together a city centre now divided by eight- and nine-lane roads, encourage more walking and ultimately make the area safer and more prosperous. But suburban worries about traffic delays took precedence over improving the downtown. So pedestrians needing to get across Portage and Main kept getting shunted down urine-tinged stairways into a bleak underground concourse. To City Hall, this was fine. Only when faced with a $73-million bill to fix the waterproofing of the subterranean passage did it decide it was too expensive to keep doing the wrong thing. The change won't turn downtown Winnipeg overnight into a pedestrian mecca. People navigating on foot the Crossroads of Canada, named for its proximity to the country's longitudinal middle, must still cross many lanes, including multiple turn lanes, but it's a step in the right direction. A nation's crossroads: Winnipeg's famed Portage and Main intersection, shut to pedestrians for nearly half a century, has been reborn Unfortunately, civic foot-dragging is not unique to the City of Winnipeg. Consider the economics of sprawl. Cities that exploded in size in the latter half of the 20th century were able to do so cheaply because of constant expansion. Fees charged on new development helped keep taxes down for existing residents. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a sort of Ponzi scheme. Such an approach works – if one is willing to set aside the loss of green space and increasingly awful commutes that an expanding city requires – as long as there was more land to be developed. When the land within city boundaries runs out, the party stops. And typically that means substantial property tax increases, because it's expensive to provide city services to homes that are spread out. Moderately increased density can both help postpone the day the land runs out and soften the tax blow, because such housing is cheaper to service. Politicians know this, but they pretend otherwise in order to avoid angering residents who don't like change. Or consider how road space is divvied up in a crowded metropolis. It's self-evident in dense cities, where the roads are essentially full, that future residents will not all be able to drive. As a result, the proportion of people who get around by car will gradually decline in Canadian cities. That will require a sea change in how politicians view transportation. Making life better for non-drivers, especially people who take transit, will help cities attract the residents they need. This is why ideas such as bus-only lanes should no longer be controversial. Rejecting them is saying that drivers matter more than transit riders, that existing residents matter more than newcomers. Making it easier to get around by transit, bicycle and on foot is not an ideological stance, it's an acknowledgement that space on the road has to be shared among many users. However, instead of accepting this reality, too many city politicians fight rearguard actions to preserve the status quo. Winnipeg, refreshingly, is turning a downtown street roughly parallel to Portage into a pedestrian zone. It is also refurbishing a park near the arena where the Jets play. Doing all that without improving Portage and Main, which local councillor Vivian Santos called 'the heartbeat of Winnipeg,' would have been foolishly short-sighted. Luckily, after resisting as long as possible, city council eventually did the right thing.
CTV News
15-07-2025
- General
- CTV News
Large pit in central Edmonton draws ire of neighbours
Edmonton Watch A large construction site in Wîhkwêntôwin was supposed to be home to a 22-story residential tower, but so far it's just a large pit. CTV News Edmonton's Connor Hogg has more on what the city is doing to make sure there aren't others like it.
Irish Times
27-06-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
What's stopping us converting Dublin's O'Connell St into a residential neighbourhood?
It's not bad people who destroy cities, it's bad incentives. Bear this economic rule in mind when digesting the State's welcome initiative to save Dublin city , which was unveiled this week. 'Saving the city' might sound dramatic, but without significant remedial action, Dublin as an attractive, lived-in and innovative capital is over. We know that parts of the city are falling down, blighted by dereliction, vacancy and a general feeling of decay. The capital city of one of the richest countries in the world looks so dilapidated because it is not profitable to build homes there. If we change the incentive structure to make it profitable, improvements will follow. Great cities die without care – as many Americans know. Cities are built from the bottom up, not top-down. Unless citizens are given an opportunity to participate in regeneration, big government initiatives will fail when initial investment is not supported by ongoing incremental spending. From now on, it must be cheaper and more profitable to build, renovate and restore in the city than anywhere else in the country. This means using the tax system to create incentives in specific areas and even specific streets. Once the incentive – and this means the price – is right, builders will respond and invest enthusiastically. The Dublin City Taskforce has unveiled a blueprint to rejuvenate the capital's centre , calling for €750 million to €1 billion in new investment and identifying 'Ten Big Moves' to restore safety, vibrancy and liveability in the capital. While these proposals are all urgently needed, the real prize is to get investment money flowing into the capital on a daily basis. READ MORE The source of this investment should be the €150 billion of ordinary Irish people's savings that is sitting on deposit in the banking system, doing nothing. In the same way as living creatures require a constant flow of blood pumped by the heart, cities need a constant flow of money, incentivised by constant profitable opportunity. The domestic banking system could be the source of this investment. [ Dublin is fifth most expensive capital in Europe for living costs Opens in new window ] The traditional role of the banking system is to recycle savings of those who don't want to spend and make that money available to those who want to invest. Unfortunately, the Irish banking system acts more like a safe-deposit box in which savings are parked and not used profitably in the economy, despite the average of only 0.13 per cent interest earned. A special savings vehicle targeted at refurbishing old buildings with a tax break would liberate 10s of millions of euro into the centre of the city. Any successful redevelopment of Dublin city must incorporate a tax scheme to coax that money out of the deposits and into private residential building. The best example of reinforcing tax programmes were the urban renewal efforts of the 1990s, where huge swathes of derelict Dublin were rebuilt, and thousands of apartments were constructed in the city. It was tax-efficient to buy and live in these properties, which benefited from generous tax breaks for mortgage-holders, which made it a no-brainer to live in the city as opposed to the suburbs. Temple Bar was a good if uneven example of the success of such directed tax schemes. The new plan for the city, which proposes a special purpose vehicle – a fancy term for an independent State body – looks to be based on a similar tax structure, which is promising. Overall, this Government initiative is positive, but to make it work effectively and to tie it in with an ongoing financing requirement from the private sector, there must be a little more financial and fiscal creativity. As well as encouraging people to move into the city, it is essential to dissuade owners from hoarding or allowing buildings to become derelict Once it makes financial sense to live in the city, people will do so. People – not police – make a city safe. People police their own streets. Empty streets are dangerous streets, lively streets are safe streets, and the more people who live in an area, the more they look after their own patch. This is called having a stake in the place, and residents have a greater stake than passersby. Of course we need more gardaí on the streets, but the real game-changer is locals turning a street into a neighbourhood. For example, there are officially no residents on O'Connell Street, not one. Yet over the shops is ample space for living. What is stopping builders from converting O'Connell Street into a residential street? Incentives again. Make it tax-efficient to refurbish and tax-efficient to buy these flats, and people will come. [ Ruby Eastwood: Why would anyone choose to live in a city as ridiculous as Dublin? Opens in new window ] I've personal experience. In the early 1990s, on an average salary (IR£16,000 a year), I bought a flat on Parliament Street, in a building that was the first residential owner-occupier initiative on that street in more than 100 years. The small first-time developer was incentivised by tax breaks to buy the derelict building, and that made the refurbishment feasible. He built three flats above the ground-floor shop front. We were the only residents on Parliament Street, which was otherwise bleak and dilapidated. There were no shops or restaurants, and the roofs of many of these beautiful buildings were falling in. Lots of people thought it was mad to buy in the city, but it was much cheaper than renting in the suburbs. As a young owner, my monthly mortgage was dramatically reduced by a significant tax break. In the following few years we were followed by many more residents, and the same incentives allowed young people to buy and encouraged many young developers to take a risk and imagine a residential future over the shop for old, unloved buildings. It worked, and today Parliament Street, soon to be pedestrianised , is a wonderful place to live. Why not copy and paste this model in hundreds of city streets? As well as encouraging people to move into the city, it is essential to dissuade owners from hoarding or allowing buildings to become derelict. Again, incentives pave the way. Dereliction and vacant sites are the results of choices made by owners. It is time to put a draconian price on those choices. Urban policy should penalise bad behaviour such as presiding over dereliction, and reward good behaviour such as refurbishing old buildings. It's not that difficult, is it? We should start with vacant buildings. Recent figures from An Post's data company GeoDirectory estimate that 14,500 residential and commercial properties lie vacant across Dublin – 4,000 of which are in the city centre. There has been a marked deterioration since last year, and things are getting worse. The majority (63 per cent) of these properties have been unoccupied for one to two years, with a minority of about 23 per cent idle for more than four years. Between the canals, there are 4,082 vacant buildings. Half of them are commercial, roughly a third residential and the remainder mixed-use. The greatest concentration is in Dublin 2, home to 41 per cent of these vacant buildings, the vast majority (75 per cent) of which are commercial. D1's Victorian commercial districts (Parnell, Talbot, Capel and Dorset streets) account for more than half (610) of the vacant flats above commercial units. This column has suggested an amnesty for people who might own these properties but don't have the money or the legal clearance to refurbish them. The State could force them to sell by offering them a chance to avoid hefty penalties if they sell within a year. If not, tax them at source on other income and put the property on the market. The resulting glut of properties would force prices down, allowing responsible new owners who intend to build to buy at a bargain price. In no time the city would be transformed. We've done it before. Incentives work. Let's do it again.
CNA
25-06-2025
- Business
- CNA
New housing options, parks and improved amenities among plans under URA's draft master plan
Singaporeans now have a glimpse into how the spaces they live, work and play in will look like for the next 10 to 15 years. From new homes in the city to new community and office spaces, a draft master plan by the Urban Redevelopment Authority was unveiled on Jun 25, mapping out the grand plans for the nation's land use. Residents in some areas will get new or refreshed amenities. Some familiar, well-loved sites will be conserved, while others will be made over. Professor Sing Tien Foo, Provost's Chair Professor in the Department of Real Estate at NUS Business School, discusses the draft master plan. He talks about the strategies laid out in this master plan and how conserving heritage plays a role in Singapore's urban planning.
