Raise the Hammer

@A Smith

It doesn't apply to these municipalities because, they are not nearly the size of Hamilton and they all have suitably dense Urban areas with functional cores. Here are some sizes for you, which boggles my mind why Hamilton continues to expand it's development boundaries.

Metropolitan Hamilton: 1,371.76 km2 Hamilton Land Area: 1,117.11 km2 Hamilton Urban Area: 227.70 km2 (The area that has a density of more than 400 per km2) Burlington: 187 km2 Oakville: 138.51 km2 Vaughan: 273.58 km2 Mississauga: 288.42 km2

The vast majority of that space beyond the urban area still needs it's roads plowed, streets policed, fire services, running water, park maintenance, electricity etc.

Lets also look at Population Density, people per sq KM

Hamilton: 451.6/km2 Burlington: 885.2/km2 Oakville: 1,195.2/km2 Mississauga: 2,544.89/km2 Vaughan: 873.1/km2

Every other location, nearly the entirety of their city is an urban area that has density. Hamilton doesn't, mainly because of large amounts of suburban sprawl and swathes of unused land that it either can not, should not or is difficult to develop (such as the Escarpment, Dundas Valley, Cootes Paradise, the Ermosa Karst, the vast absentee brownfields in Stelco, Rheem, various abandoned building along Barton). Now I will agree there is quite a bit of undeveloped land in the city's area that can be developed (Flamborough, Glanbrook & Stoney Creek Mountain come to mind) but it shouldn't be developed unless it is of higher density in order to maintain it, and not at the cost of putting brownfield remediation on the backburner as poor image frightens the private sector away just as much as high taxation.

They also all have few major venues that they have to handle (save Mississauga who has a very limited amount of them) and don't have to deal with constantly eroding mountain accesses. Two major stadiums, an airport, two major post-secondary campuses, two major parkways of which the city holds a much larger chunk of maintenance costs with them (LINC, Red Hill) as opposed to ones whose costs are entirely absorbed by the higher levels of government (the 403, the 407).

It's also the fact these towns turned cities aren't nearly as old as Hamilton and haven't had to deal with aging infrastructure yet. Mississauga was established in 1968, Burlington became a city in 1974, Hamilton became a city in 1847. Now it's now that they've been around a while that the infrastructure costs are now creeping in on these municipalities. It's also a matter that Hamilton has not made the investments needed in it's core to overhaul the infrastructure, as as a result experiencing high costs to maintain them.