We live in a society - yes.
But that’s the reason many of the development fees were put in back in the 1970s and 80s - there were significant equity issues where the exponentially growing new shiny suburbs were built on the property taxes of a much smaller base of urban homeowners who were left with old, inferior and unmaintained city infrastructure.
So, let’s seriously consider whether what the equity issues are now and whether those fees are reasonable cost recovery for infrastructure vs a tax cash grab - or if there’s enough of a base of established homeowners that they could carry the development costs for new homes through reasonable tax increases.
We’re in Ottawa, so that may be an exception, but generally here it’s been extraordinarily expensive to develop the suburbs beyond the greenbelt, and until the development fees were increased in the late 90s, studies showed that new homeowners only bore about 1/5th of the cost.
Much of the development classification from farmland was effectively unplanned and forced through by suburban municipal councils before the amalgamation in the 1990s.
The costs of extending utilities across the National Capital Commission lands was extraordinary and no one inside the greenbelt benefited. A major bridge had to be built because the traffic impact was not considered etc.
There have been more recent improvements such as the retroactive construction of separate wastewater and storm water systems in the core that benefit everyone by keeping sewage out of the rivers.
The O-train construction unfortunately has been a burden on all without the benefits that should come with a modern rapid transit system.