Growth
Growth that works pays for itself. Denser housing on land the city already serves builds value without adding cost. Sprawl adds maintenance even the increased tax base cannot afford. When it comes to industry, we have the port, rail, and workforce to grow well. We have to find the right match.
Where I stand
Saint John’s suburbs and rural areas are part of the city’s identity. The platform’s path to a sustainable city runs through growing the urban core: dense infill on serviced land, mixed-use on the corridors, corner stores in residential zones, smaller infrastructure on rebuild. As the core grows, the suburbs and rural neighbourhoods become more valuable, not less. It is not that we have too many suburbs. It is that we don’t have enough city.
Aristotle thought a city should be small enough that citizens know each other, but large enough to be self-sufficient. The bar has moved since then. A modern city needs enough people to keep its own hospital staffed, its own university enrolled, its own trades employed, its own arts and food and transit running on local talent. Saint John is not there yet. For a generation we have been losing young people to cities that are, leaving an aging population behind and a city that has to bring in outside consultants and service providers to do work it no longer has the people to do.
Growth is the right ambition. Our population is finally rising again, and we have unbuilt opportunity in our industrial parks, our underused commercial space, and empty lots where old houses fell down.
The question is not whether to grow. It is which kind of growth pays its own way and which kind sends the bill to the next generation. Every new development raises or lowers tax density, the value-per-square-metre of land that already pays for plowing, water, fire response, and patching. Dense infill on already-serviced land compounds. Sprawl spreads the same tax base across more lane-kilometres of road and asks the rest of us to subsidize it forever.
This is not a left-right idea. It is the math the city’s own infrastructure deficit ($545 million and growing) is forcing on us. Density is structural efficiency. Sprawl is the opposite. Density both enables and requires walkable neighbourhoods, affordable transit, and local shopping.
Density is also about who fills what is already there. A concentration of commuters makes a bus route viable. More families nearby can fill a playground. More customers make a bakery or a coffee shop successful. When density is low, buses run empty and routes get cut. People driving don’t stop at a corner store. Kids strapped in the back of cars don’t socialize. Neighbourhoods pull back to their homes and back yards. Community and local economy shrink.
Building four-to-six units per lot is already allowed city-wide. The most direct lever is development charges that reflect what a new low-density approval actually costs the city: the road, the water and sewer, the plowing, the eventual rebuild over the next fifty years. Charging the full cost up front does two things at once. It slows the pipeline of new sprawl the city cannot afford to maintain. And it raises the relative value of every home already built, because the new builds finally price the actual cost into the sale.
The same principle holds for industrial growth. Land is scarce, and servicing it costs the city. Make the most of it. When evaluating projects, we should look at tax density, job density and supply chain density. A good project is one that hires locally, fits a small footprint, uses local suppliers, and either produces for local markets or uses our port and rail to move goods. Good industry doesn’t just work, it connects to the city.
What I will push for on council
- Make permit fees reflect cost-of-services: raise fees on low-density projects, reward dense ones.
- Scrutinize every greenfield and surplus parkland disposal before approval.
- Apply the same infill-first principle in industrial zoning: use the serviced land we already have.
- Prioritize industries that fit Saint John’s existing strengths: advanced manufacturing, clean-tech, port and rail, electric micromobility, modular construction. Not data centres.
- City procurement that keeps money in the local economy: prefer co-ops and locally-owned firms when the math works.
- Continue and accelerate zoning reform (ZoneSJ); remove permit barriers that punish dense projects.
- Fill commercial vacancies before approving new commercial square footage.