Urban utopia: how to bring paradise to the city

   There is a path to creating an urban utopia here where taxes are low and services are high.
    But be ready for some tough questions: is it immoral to oppose new condo construction? Should churches or heritage buildings be demolished and replaced by office towers?
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For our pregame skate, consider this.

• Place Ville Marie pays a stupendous $31 million per year to Montreal in taxes.
• Montreal spends $155 million annually clearing snow.
• Police costs Montrealers $587 million annually.
• Non-profits often pay very little for their municipal taxes.

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   The lovely landmark Trinity Church has occupied a space on Sherbrooke Street near Marlowe since 1926 but it's no longer being employed to worship the man in the sky.
   The 3,300 square metre terrain houses a church structure on a property worth $2.4 million. How much does the city collect in taxes from the property? It's a mystery, as they craftily conceal certain tax bills from the evalweb site by triggering a "error, try again" alert.
    But it's safe to assume that the Trinity, which no longer operates as a church, enjoys a considerable exemption and pays something like $12,000 a year.
   In spite of its obsolescence, there might be reasons for preserving the venerable old greystone including the fact that the NDG food bank operates from the premises (although it could be easily relocated back to lower rent De Maisonneuve). It's one of NDG's rare beautiful things, in an area with such eyesores as the corner of Decarie and Sherbrooke.
   But on the other hand, if the church were demolished and a condo or commercial project were to replace it, it would bring in around $200,000 more to the municipality.
   That extra $188,0000 could be given to 38 NDG students in the form of $5,000 scholarships.
   Hello education, hello opportunity, hello youth, hello utopia.
   That same new condo revenue could alternately go to a variety of different directions, such as government-subsidized housing, which some people seem to favour, even though its advocates often fight against the funding required to build them.
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    To distribute wealth one must first create wealth.  Therefore opposing condos could be argued to be immoral.
   So the solution is clear: knock down all the churches and replace them with Place Ville Maries and we'll live in paradise.
    Of course there's no demand for a Place Ville Marie on every street corner and besides, carpet-bagging developers can manipulate politicians with the lure of increased revenues.
   Take for example the Overdale example from the late 1980s in which wealthy art dealer Robert Landau promised the city that he'd build a luxurious condo project if they would simply allow him to evict the 100 people living on the land.
   The Dore administration was dazzled by the promised new revenues and sneakily declared the structures uninhabitable. Several councillors quit the party and Dore was eventually voted out of power.
   The emptied land lay empty for decades, with a tax revenue considerably cheaper than what the city had dreamed of.
  No mechanism can ensure that a developer goes through with a property he promises to build, so there is always a risk of demolishing an existing structure and regretting it for a long time after.
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   Buildings owned and occupied by non-profit organizations are sometimes eligible to get dirt-cheap tax rates.
   Churches and other non-profit-owned and occupied buildings can apply for municipal tax exemptions from the Quebec Municipal Commission which, if accepted, allows them to pay just .50 cents per $100, so the Lachine Curling Club pays a mere $6,800 on a $1.3 million-evaluated property, as noted in its tax bill which is marked compensations immeubles exempt
   One can see the fate of each application by toggling through its decisions on the jugements.qc.ca site.
   Many places do not appear to have such exemptions, such as the Royal Legion, Mount Royal Tennis Club and others. But that doesn't mean that they don't hurt the bottom line.
   Take for example, the Royal Montreal Curling Club at 1850 De Maisonneuve W.
   It's an urban treasure. It's 1,500 square metre property is evaluated at almost two million dollars and pays $63,000 annually in taxes to the city.
    Let's say the owners wanted to demolish it it to build a tower.
   The Chateau Latour across the street, built in 1992, brings in $147,000 per year at just two thirds the same footprint size.
   If one were to demolish the curling club and replace it with a similar structure, it could come at the cost of a lovely building with great history but it would also bring good things, it would densify the downtown area, increase commerce to local shops and businesses and presumably raise the vacancy rate and lower rents as a result. It's win-win-win, although only quaint heritage loses.
   And of course, it would bring another $100,000 to city coffers per year.
   Same goes for the 1875-built 560 square metre Montreal Racket Club, which is a club that you cannot get in so it's hard to get sentimental about. It's in prime real estate at 396 de la Concorde and pays $69,000 in annual taxes. Knocking it down would surely allow for a structure that pays much more into the city coffers
   Sentimentally clinging onto older structures is a fine thing to do but let's be aware of the dollar costs involved when making that commitment.
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   The other component of this urban utopia is in watching how cities spend.
   Bureaucracies are famous for their stupefying waste and great secrecy and normal people are too busy living their lives to watch over how ever penny is spent. (Cue the old jokes about how many ethnic basketball associations are getting cash this year from the NDG borough).
   But we need to get vigilant, so the good guys win and the poor people benefit instead of the crooks.
   Do we really need all that late-winter snow clearing when the snow is going to melt anyway?
   Can't we just replace those $20,000-a-year traffic lights with stop signs?
   Isn't it time to replace the 11-minutes-of-work-for-$35-an-hour zamboni driver with a self-driving ice cleaning machine?
   These are the questions we need to start asking. While data is flowing more than ever, bureaucrats are still secretive and will often hide behind access-to-information. Neighbourhood newspapers are dead and mainstream news outlets send their reduced staffs to press conferences rather than get in-depth on nuts-and-bolts issues like municipal spending.
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   So the time is now to internalize a collective consciousness of how the city is funded and managed. Le'ts do the legwork to get the information and become aware that this is our money that they are spending. With every step towards that consciousness we come closer to living in an urban utopia where the poor are less poor and all receive better services.