Richmond Hill does not have to become anti-car, European, or trendy. But the current suburban model is expensive to maintain, expensive for households, and increasingly hard for cities to afford.
By Saeed Vahid
You can call it Amsterdam. You can call it naive. You can call it tree-hugging, anti-car, European dreaming, or another imported planning fashion that does not belong in Richmond Hill.
But the spreadsheet does not care what we call it.
Sooner or later, money has a way of cutting through our slogans. Roads wear out. Pipes age. Stormwater systems need repair. Community centres need renovation. Sidewalks, parks, bridges, watermains, sewers and public buildings all come with lifecycles. They do not last forever because we like them. They last only if we maintain them.
And that is where the conversation about Richmond Hill’s future has to become more honest.
The case for walkable streets, bikeable connections, gentle density, mixed-use neighbourhoods and less mandatory parking is not mainly about lifestyle. It is not about pretending Richmond Hill is Paris or Amsterdam. It is not about shaming people who drive. Most of us drive. Many of us need to drive. Cars will remain part of life here.
The real question is whether we can afford a city where almost every single daily task requires a car.
Because that is not just a transportation choice. It is a financial model.
Richmond Hill’s 2026 operating budget is $257.9 million. The 3.46% property tax rate increase includes a 1.5% Capital Asset Sustainability Levy, which the City describes as a long-term investment to keep roads, buildings and infrastructure in good condition. The 2026 capital budget adds another $121.1 million in planned investment, including road reconstruction, watermain upgrades, natural area restoration and facility repairs.
That is not ideological language. That is the city telling us what the bill looks like.
The case for walkable streets, bikeable connections, gentle density, mixed-use neighbourhoods and less mandatory parking is not mainly about lifestyle.
The real question is whether we can afford a city where almost every single daily task requires a car.
Richmond Hill also manages and maintains approximately $13.8 billion worth of infrastructure assets across roads, watermains, sewers, parks, facilities, fleet, equipment and other service areas.
That number should change how we talk about growth.
Too often, local debates are framed around what people like or dislike. Do we like bike lanes? Do we like density? Do we like parking? Do we like narrower streets? Do we like taller buildings? Do we like traffic calming?
Those are real questions, but they are not enough.
The harder question is: what kind of city can actually pay for itself?
A spread-out, car-dependent city is not cheap. It only feels cheap when the infrastructure is new, the pavement is smooth, the pipes are young, and growth is still bringing in fresh revenue. But after a few decades, the maintenance bill starts to arrive.
That is the Strong Towns warning in one sentence: the first generation of suburban growth often looks profitable, but the long-term replacement cost can exceed what the development pattern can realistically support. Strong Towns calls this the “Growth Ponzi Scheme” because communities can create a short-term illusion of wealth while taking on long-term liabilities they struggle to maintain later.
That phrase may sound dramatic. But look at what municipalities actually have to manage.
The Financial Accountability Office of Ontario has reported that Ontario’s municipalities own more public infrastructure than the provincial and federal governments combined. In its review, the FAO estimated the current replacement value of municipal infrastructure at $484 billion in 2020, including roads, bridges, water systems, stormwater, wastewater, parks, facilities, transit and other assets.
The backlog is not abstract either. In the FAO’s 2024 municipal infrastructure briefing, roads represented the largest share of the infrastructure backlog, at $21.1 billion, or 41%. Roads and bridges together made up almost half of the total backlog, while water infrastructure made up almost a third.
So when people say “just widen the road,” “just add parking,” “just keep building outward,” or “just let everyone drive,” the word “just” is doing a lot of work.
There is no “just” in a city budget.
Every lane has to be plowed, patched, swept, drained, lit, signalled, policed, resurfaced and eventually rebuilt. Every new road extension creates future maintenance. Every spread-out subdivision adds more pipes, roads and services per household. Every parking lot pushes destinations farther apart, making walking less useful and driving more necessary.
Then we act surprised when taxes rise, when cities introduce special levies, when user fees increase, when water rates go up, and when councils say they need more money just to keep existing assets in good condition.
This is the boring part of municipal life. But it is also the most important part.
A city can win applause for cutting ribbons on new projects. Nobody throws a parade for replacing a pipe before it fails. Nobody campaigns on culvert maintenance. Nobody puts “state of good repair” on a lawn sign and expects people to cheer.
But that is where the real cost of a city lives.
The current model also pushes costs onto households. A car-dependent city does not only require public spending. It requires private spending too.
Statistics Canada reported that Canadian households spent an average of $76,750 on goods and services in 2023, up 14.3% from 2021. Transportation was the second-largest category after shelter, accounting for 15.8% of total consumption, just ahead of food at 15.7%.
In other words, car dependency is not only a city budget problem. It is a family budget problem.
When a household needs two or three cars to function, that is not freedom. That is a subscription fee to participate in daily life. Insurance, fuel, maintenance, tires, repairs, parking, financing and depreciation all become part of the cost of living in a place where alternatives are weak or unsafe.
And when people are already stressed by housing, groceries, childcare, taxes and interest rates, the transportation burden matters.
This is why the “anti-car” label misses the point.
The goal is not to punish drivers. The goal is to stop making driving mandatory for everything.
A spread-out, car-dependent city is not cheap. It only feels cheap when the infrastructure is new. But after a few decades, the maintenance bill starts to arrive.
A city where a teenager can walk to a part-time job, a senior can reach a pharmacy safely, a parent can let a child walk to school, and a resident can buy a few things without starting the car is not anti-car. It is financially smarter.
Every short trip that can happen safely without a car reduces pressure on the road system. It reduces household costs. It reduces the need for endless parking. It makes transit more viable. It supports nearby businesses. It makes better use of infrastructure we already have.
The cheapest road expansion is the trip that did not need to be a car trip in the first place.
This is where Richmond Hill has to stop treating walkability as decoration.
A walkable street is not just a nicer street. It is a street that extracts more value from the public investment already made. A main street with people living nearby, small shops at street level, safe crossings and useful public space produces more activity per metre of infrastructure than a wide road lined with parking lots and isolated buildings.
Gentle density works the same way.
A duplex, triplex, garden suite, small apartment building or mixed-use building near existing services is not just a housing idea. It is a financial idea. It adds people and tax base in places where roads, pipes, parks, schools, transit and services already exist. It helps the city get more value from infrastructure we have already paid for.
By contrast, spreading growth outward often means building more infrastructure first and hoping the future tax base can cover the full lifecycle cost later.
That is a risky bet.
Richmond Hill does not need towers everywhere. But it does need more productive land use in more places. If we block small, gradual change across most neighbourhoods, pressure builds until growth arrives in bigger, more disruptive forms. Then residents feel ambushed, politicians get defensive, and the city still has not solved the underlying financial problem.
Small change is not the enemy. Small change is how a city adapts without crisis.
The same is true of parking.
Free parking is never free. It is paid for through higher rents, higher prices, larger lots, longer walking distances, weaker main streets and more land consumed by storage for vehicles. When we require too much parking, we do not simply make life easier for drivers. We make every destination farther apart and every non-driving option less practical.
Then we say nobody walks.
Of course nobody walks when the city is designed like walking is an afterthought.
Of course nobody bikes when major roads feel dangerous.
Of course transit struggles when the first and last part of the trip is unpleasant, disconnected or unsafe.
These are not natural laws. They are design outcomes. And design outcomes have financial consequences.
The uncomfortable truth is that Richmond Hill’s current pattern asks everyone to pay twice. First, we pay publicly for the roads, pipes, signals, maintenance and capital renewal. Then we pay privately through the cost of owning and operating cars because the city gives us so few practical alternatives.
That is why this debate should not be reduced to cyclists versus drivers, or urbanists versus suburban families.
The real divide is between a city that keeps adding expensive obligations and a city that starts asking whether each block, each street and each development pattern can carry its own weight.
This does not mean every solution has to be grand or expensive. In fact, the Strong Towns approach is almost the opposite. It argues for small, incremental, practical changes.
Make dangerous crossings safer. Allow more homes near existing services. Let small shops exist closer to where people live. Stop forcing every business to provide more parking than it needs. Use traffic calming where people are getting hurt or afraid to walk. Build missing sidewalk links. Connect trails to real destinations. Let neighbourhoods evolve gradually instead of freezing them until only big projects make financial sense.
None of this is glamorous. That is the point.
The financially responsible city is not always the one with the biggest project. It is often the one that makes thousands of small, useful decisions that reduce long-term liabilities and increase everyday productivity.
Richmond Hill residents do not need to love the language of urbanism to care about this.
They only need to care about taxes, water bills, road repairs, housing costs, traffic, local businesses, and whether their children will inherit a city that can maintain what it has built.
The financial reality is coming whether we dress it up in planning language or not.
We can keep pretending walkable streets are a lifestyle luxury. We can keep treating bike lanes as a cultural symbol. We can keep acting as if gentle density is a threat and parking is free. We can keep saying Richmond Hill is just a suburb and this is simply how suburbs work.
But asphalt has no ideology. Pipes have no politics. Budgets do not care about culture wars.
The bill is still coming.
And when it arrives, the question will not be whether Richmond Hill should have copied Europe.
The question will be why we waited so long to build a city that was safer, more useful and more affordable to maintain.