Flying on Fumes: the plan to bring Hamilton into the 1950s

There have been some interesting recent developments in Hamilton's urban development strategy. The city expects a 20% swell in Hamilton’s population by 2030, with most of the new development envisioned to use the land around the airport. In a nod to B-grade sci-fi movies of the early 1950s, the umbrella term for this development is the Aerotropolis. This business technocrat’s nostalgic wet dream will apparently house 150,000 while employing 50,000. Hamilton airport will be the locus for this project, and will serve as the centre of a network of highways that will increase traffic flows between the Buffalo-Niagara region and the GTA.

The impetus for development seems to be the more family-friendly nature of real estate in Hamilton, as well as the city’s central location relative to nearby urban centres. City planners believe that new residents will flock to Hamilton in order to avoid the high cost of living in Toronto and its neighbouring suburbs. This belief is preceded by two other acts of faith: 1. that Hamilton real estate prices will stay low, and 2. that the price of transportation will also stay low.

So what is this about our low real estate costs in Hamilton? It is true that you can purchase a home in Hamilton for about 2/3 what it would cost in Toronto and maybe 4/5 of its cost in Oakville or Mississauga. Yet, these lower costs have everything to do with the fact that Hamilton skilfully avoided the economic boom of the mid to late 1990s that fuelled the real estate markets of those municipalities. Smart development has begun to reverse that trend to some degree. Many analysts have stated that due to extensive condo development, Toronto, for example, has cooled off as a real estate market, and prices for homes in several areas have actually dropped since 2002.

If Hamilton were indeed to become a hotspot for development, doesn’t it follow that housing prices will increase to match the extra money flowing into the city? Furthermore, we should question what increased property values would mean to Hamilton’s many lower-income families. The increase in property values associated with a booming suburban development would likely mean the continued marginalization of the downtown core.

The development requirements associated with sprawl include more infrastructure than just highways – roads and sidewalks, water and sewage, electricity, garbage collection, education, health and law enforcement services, etc. Currently, property taxes remain high downtown despite the relative weakness of the local economy in relation to suburban shopping centres such as the Meadowlands. Subsidies have been maintained to encourage business development in outlying regions of Hamilton. At the same time, the city must realize its operating budget from somewhere, and consequently core residents currently bear a majority of the tax burden.

The second and perhaps more prescient issue to consider in the aerotropolis debate is of course energy consumption. As has been pointed out in much of the local press, the city’s plan for development requires a high degree of cheap and accessible individual transportation. Increasing dependence on automobiles in order to link car corridors to distant jobs while living and shopping in suburban areas, and ultimately make the aerotropolis plan feasible, requires a cheap and increasing supply of fossil fuels. Additionally, the economic locus of the project – the expansion of the airport itself – requires a boom in the airline industry. As for being cheap, anyone can tell you that oil prices are going in only one direction.

What about all this oil talk? Sure, it’s almost de rigour to belittle oil these days, with opinions on oil’s links to war, terror, and economic subservience finding much ink in the press. Many people quickly tire of the discussion. But one thing both sides should be able to agree on is that as a collective, modern countries are exceedingly good at using oil. Better than we have ever been, in fact. We have made the process of extracting and consuming oil so efficient that nearly every human in industrialized countries has access to a decent supply of it whenever they need it (and perhaps more tellingly, even when they don’t). Consequently, we started taking it for granted on the consumer side of things, thus allowing a great deal of waste. Oil producers get rich no matter how much oil is used, and consumers, well, they get to have a socially acceptable substance addiction.

Everyone was winning until that very famous oil crisis of the 1970s, when prices reached a point that rendered cars inaccessible to many North Americans. What was that about anyway? That’s where the concept of peak oil comes into play.

Peak oil refers to the fact that oil production doesn’t "gush" the way that it does in Looney Tunes. Instead, it follows a bell curve, with production starting slowly, quickly accelerating, levelling off, decelerating slowly, then rapidly declining. Naturally, oil is most expensive when you begin or end the process. Peak oil has already occurred in America’s domestic supply: the U.S. was the gold standard for oil production until it peaked at 11 million barrels a day in 1970, and the country has been in rapid decline since, hence its dependence on foreign sources.
Outside of the US Department of Energy, most industry insiders have calculated that the world will reach peak oil production sometime between 2003 (coincidentally enough, that year was the start of the Iraq war) and 2015. From that point onward, there is no way to avoid a vast increase in oil costs.

As a consequence, any process which relies on oil as an energy source is doomed to becoming increasingly and prohibitively expensive. Being the least fuel-efficient form of transportation available to consumers, aeroplanes are simply not the answer to future development. Air travel will likely return to its roots as a hobby for the rich. This is not to suggest that masses of humans will never fly again, just that until we can make flying vehicles using alternative energy sources, reliance on the industry seems to my eyes a logistical nightmare given the world’s declining stocks of oil.

Maybe just for a second I’ll play the devil’s advocate. It is possible to incorporate mass transit into the proposed development plan. Principally, it is now a perfect time for Canada invest in a high-speed rail network in this country. A corridor in southern Ontario would allow commuters to live in Hamilton and work in Windsor, Toronto, or Ottawa without sacrificing the environment to the blight of highways and their resulting air pollution. Canadian companies such as Bombardier could construct the trains and the infrastructure with steel from Hamilton, thus providing some of those proposed 50,000 aerotropolis jobs. Furthermore, to decrease transportation requirements as a whole, it is time to reintegrate work spaces with domestic spaces, which ironically enough is traditionally what city cores have always done. High-density zoning is the key here, so that we do not have to sacrifice our rich local farmlands to treeless suburban driveways and parking lots as suggested by the current aerotropolis plan.

Maybe Aerotropolis really is a nostalgic dream, back to the highway expansions of the 1950s. Let me complete the metaphor. All those little toy spaceships and cars that signify 1950s Americana, well they were made of American metal back then. Their modern counterparts are plastic, manufactured in China, and engineered to be disposable: three characteristics which signal the increased load we have placed upon our oil supplies, and the increased hubris with which urban planners render economic development as a monolithic and unidirectional entity.

Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas

Guardian Unlimited published an interesting article in May which you can find here .

Launch a local awareness campaign by screening the film End of Suburbia .

Even old guard oil producers like Chevron are getting serious about peak oil.