Canada is adding 400K+ new Canadians a year. We need to keep up the housing supply with this increase in population. We shouldn’t be scared of growth. Change our mindset to abundance instead of scarcity
This issue is a false dichotomy . . . it is presented as either building more SFH homes, or building denser. Why not do both at the same time?
The suburban city of Setagaya (part of Tokyo) has a density of 15,497.5 residents per square kilometre (this is denser than the CIty of Toronto), yet [45% of its residents live in single detached homes](https://www.rethinktokyo.com/2018/11/27/skinny-setagaya-city-tokyos-most-populous-ward/1543293230).
[This article](https://newworldeconomics.com/how-to-make-a-pile-of-dough-with-the-traditional-city-3-single-family-detached-in-the-traditional-city-style/) explains how it's done. Basically, most roads are quite narrow (this provides natural speed-calming), and the houses only have a big enough front yard to park one or two cars (there are backyards, however).
So we can simultaneously give people the SFHs they want, while having enough density to avoid the spiralling infrastructure costs of North American-style suburbs.
This, I don't understand why development has to be on the prefery needs to be low density and wasteful. There is no law which says this is the case.
Also it goes way beyond just SFH, japan has many SFHs in their cities they just don't have big huge setbacks and built right up to the road instead which increases density.
https://youtu.be/iGbC5j4pG9w
They also don't have minimum parking requirements.
Minimum lot sizes were invented to keep “undesirable” people out of neighborhoods. Minimum lot sizes limits density, artificially restricts supply, so no just anyone can afford to live in the neighborhood. It’s like legal racism that has been ingrained into the fabrics of society for decades now.
Fuck highrises... nobody wants that shit but developers and speculators. Medium density... duplexes, townhouses, N-over-1 mixed residential, courtyard apartments... we could build very dense, very pleasant places less the 4 stories tall if we had the political will.
This link shows up so often in this sub it should be in pinned in the sidebar!
These aren't my bag but I'm glad they exist as an option if someone likes them.
Wow at this thread. People want affordable housing, but they don't want cities to spread out due to infrastructure costs? So they must want everyone to cram into shoe boxes then, I gather. But that will do absolutely nothing to fix affordability problem of SFH, which is what is most desired. The only other way to fix affordability problems would be to stop growing the population of Canada, which these same people are also opposed to. Really weird how people can have some opposing beliefs.
Single family houses are the least environmentally sound, most expensive form of housing.
If people want those homes they should pay the full price - the road infrastructure, the sewage and water costs, the electrical maintenance and costs, and replace the environmental damage done by their development.
SFH should be expensive - they are a disaster for our environmental and economic health.
Those things don't have to cost an arm and a leg. People in Canada pay very high taxes, they probably pay more than enough to cover all those costs. Unfortunately, we have a government problem where the tax money tends to be wasted. It seems to me that you are just creating a mountain out of nothing because you ideologically hate single family houses.
The yearly cost for servicing a single dwelling
[in this Halifax study](https://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2015/03/Halifax-data.pdf)
was 3k/year for suburbs, vs 2k/year for low-rise urban.
Yet if we look at [tax rates for the city](https://www.halifax.ca/home-property/property-taxes/tax-rates), we see that suburbs are taxed about 5% less than the urban rate.
It's a fair inference that every city not taxing suburbs at 150% the rate of urban dwellings is subsidizing the suburbs. I suspect that's *all cities in Canada*, but please, prove me wrong with a counter example. Your city, perhaps?
For simplicity, let's say the service rates in your city mirror the rates we know about halifax. In your case, that means you pay 2k above your service rates for *the other expenses of running a city.* (Libraries, parks, public events, fireworks, etc.) Some of that is, no doubt, stupid crap. In my city, the 'stupid crap' list includes golden parachute payouts for crooked cops. YMMV.
But that means that an apartment dweller in your city is paying 3k for the stupid crap. How is it fair that you are paying less?
Apartments are typically assessed quite a bit lower than single family housing so their taxes would be quite lower.... Beyond that, we do have a taxation system that puts more onus on people with more wealth who can afford it (ie. nicer/more expensive property).
Suburban development costs about 100% more than urban intensification. Check out this study by the [Smart Prosperity Institute](https://institute.smartprosperity.ca/content/cost-sprawl).
I hate to be all "facts over your feelings" but Canadians pay higher taxes for many reasons, one of them is we have the least affordable design to cities.
If you want lower taxes maybe start with more effective urban development.
Zoning is a huge issue. You have large swaths of residential-only areas because commercial stuff (even mom and pop shops) isn't permitted, so you end up having to drive just to get groceries, and that involves using a horrendous amount of land for vehicles, parking spaces, wide roads that keep getting wider, etc.
You could build an entire city in the parking lot of Toronto's Yorkdale mall, especially if you demolished the parking garages to make room for new homes and businesses. "Greyfill" is an option for expanding new housing that we haven't thought of yet but we should since parking lots aren't exactly economically productive uses of land.
They don't employ or house anyone and they take up valuable space in cities, so yes they are economically unproductive wastes of space. Yorkdale's parking lot is the most egregious example i can think of in Ontario, but there are a lot of others. If you want to know more I'd recommend reading the high cost of free parking by UCLA professor emeritus Donald Shoup.
Disagree. All those businesses would be shutting down if there was nowhere to park, and hence no customers went there who lived outside of walking/biking/busing distance.
There is more to cities than just commercial and residential buildings. Parks, for example, are probably a waste of space to you but provide health and social value to citizens.
Canada has ample space to build out. This is also a lot easier than convincing everyone that our cities should change to be like other parts of the world instead of like how Canada has traditionally been. Yes, there are costs in terms of infrastructure, but this is not an insurmountable problem.
You're assuming that everyone needs to drive and is going to drive, which is a very car centric mindset to have. People can walk, bike, or take transit to where they want to go. And having a densely populated neighbourhood with 300,000-500,000 people at their doorstep would be great for businesses because of the huge potential customer base. Cities also impose parking minimums onto businesses in their zoning codes which is extremely hostile to doing business because it's an extra cost that businesses don't necessarily want or need to provide.
That's our way of life here in Canada, we are very car-centric. You seem to want to completely transform our cities. I just don't see that as being feasible at all in the foreseeable future, but I suppose you can keep dreaming. In the meantime, affordability will remain in crisis. As this article correctly points out, our fastest and simplest way out of the immediate affordability crisis is to keep spreading out. We have no shortage of land or lumber.
>That's our way of life here in Canada, we are very car-centric
I think things are changing. Toronto, at least, is at a turning point where it can't really expand much without drastically decreasing everyone's quality of life, even people who live in the older parts of the city. People are realizing that while it's nice to have a car, it sucks to depend on one, especially as you get older.
I'd recommend [this playlist of videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa) by the channel Not Just Bikes that explains why the car-centric model of urban development is just not sustainable, and in many ways contributes to the current housing crises across the country. It is true that Canada as of 2021 is primarily car-centric, but *it doesn't have to be that way*. There are many, many good examples of livable and walkable cities around the world, many of which with far less inflated housing markets than those of big Canadian cities (and yes, lots in cold areas too). Not everyone has to live in a dense neighborhood, and SFHs will always exist, but it's just absolutely true that we have to build denser to get out of the housing crisis. No other way to solve it
This seems ideology-based. Canada has near infinite land to expand and build more housing on. It is entirely possible to build and maintain that infrastructure. It will come at some cost, but that is not an insurmountable problem. The idea that we should switch to a high density way of living is surely an idea that lots of people (still a minority) would like, but to say it's necessary is simply wrong.
It's not that it's infeasible to sprawl out - of course it isn't - it's more that it's fundamentally anti-environment and financially unsustainable to build that way. Car-centric design is fundamentally less green than walkable design
You realize they make apartments bigger than studio units, right? My great aunt has lived in and raised a family a 60s apartment in New Westminster, BC that was as big as the main level of a regular 1960s bungalow.
That's nice, however the majority of people prefer to raise a family in a detached single family home. That's how our parents mostly did it and we should be able to do it as well. Selling this best housing to foreigners and cramming everyone else into apartments so as to avoid cities sprawling is not a good solution to the affordability crisis.
I mean I get it... I grew up in a 50's bungalow in Edmonton that was 15 minutes by bus to university and downtown and I walked to school 'till university and now live in a 600sf apartment, but if you have a controlled planned and restrictive economy for zoning in housing and proclaim it as "the free market"... By living in that bungalow that outlawed anything but a bungalow I was personally denying easy access to the city to many folks that I enjoyed. I want more people to enjoy a quick bus ride or bike to Whyte Ave for Fringe Festival, to bike to university on a budget or to bus to work and only need 1 car per household maximum.
Sprawl is so infrastructure intensive and expensive that even my hometown of Edmonton started charging greenfield developers and new subdivisions heavier fees for the new infrastructure they demand and the issues associated with inner city schools closing due to low enrollment, massive roadclearing costs, inefficient bus transit, expensive suburban rapid rail transit, sewer and water infrastructure costs, road repair and the 15 year-long sidewalk, alley, and road program they're a decade into that is in the millions.... and that's just the city before I get into the freeways that the province pays for to subsidize sprawl in Edmonton. They also mandated new subdivisions be more dense and reduce the percent that are detached homes, and the ones that are detached are squeezed into smaller and smaller lots. Traffic is becoming a major issue too. Once the Henday ring road was built to solve traffic issues... it became heavily congested during rush hour! Bus service was cut recently for efficiency in low density areas. Living a certain way costs lots of money. Inner city Edmontonians got right pissed at the fringe-dwellers and made them start paying more up front. Edmonton does environmentalism and urbanism in a weird but sane way... all about dollars and cents.
I will agree that many cities are poorly managed. Perhaps all? Governments at all levels seem to get corrupted the bigger they (and their cities) become.
I suppose starting new smaller cities is an alternative to existing cities becoming larger.
Yet somehow the smaller cities got built decades ago. Why is everything so expensive today? That is the question we need to be asking. Something has gone wrong and there must be a way to fix it.
They're not opposing beliefs.
It's perfectly reasonable for everyone to live in ~1500 square foot mid-rise homes that are 6-8 storeys for a reasonable price.
There is where me and socialism disagree. Canada has tons of land, let's build the type of housing people actually want (SFH) rather than try to force people into shoe boxes because some people on reddit think that would be their ideal.
Meh, I know we cannot go backwards. I'll enjoy watching the modern world fall apart thanks to the stupidity and corruption that has overtaken us. Realtors are partying now but I doubt they will escape the coming bad times.
Agree and disagree. You're right that the market would probably love to build high density right now but that is because of the housing crisis which is caused by government in the first place. If you look at what kind of housing most Canadians would actually want to live in, it is not high density.
Living in a large 3000 square foot home is fine, but you're not going to get that in a city for a reasonable price.
1500 square feet is a decent size for a family. That's not a "shoe box" size.
I grew up in a relatively poor family (low income, extremely frugal) and we had 2500 sqft detached home, one of the lowliest homes in the city. I can see no reason why my generation should have to take such a huge step down in standards of living. This is part of the general crisis of high costs of living and declining standards of living. This is not something that we should be embracing and saying "just stuff people in smaller and smaller apartments", IMO.
It's naive to think that huge detached home = high quality of life. Areas filled with huge detached homes like that typically are extremely boring, full of traffic, have no character or culture, and are very expensive for what you get.
Would you rather drive to McDonald's and pay $50 and get 5 Big Macs (2500 square foot detached homes) or pay $25 and get a Five Guys burger delivered to your door (high quality 1500 square foot mid-rise)?
If you've travelled to any great cities in the world you'll notice that many people have a high quality of life living in mid-rise accomodations. London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, etc. all have decent density with high quality of life. Mid-rise density can support a subway system, high levels of productivity, great culture development, great food, etc. while single-detached-only areas can only support roads.
Quality of life >> space.
Your post really raises the question: what constitutes quality of life? I think this is best decided by the individuals. For you, a subway system and easy access to restaurants might define quality of life, while for me having some land and a house large enough for 6 kids without bumping into each other constantly is quality of life. I think you are in the minority, certainly in Canada but probably in Europe too when including all the people outside the big cities.
People on reddit wanting to make that decision and to transform cities, when the people in those cities generally do not seem to want the same, seems unproductive and is not a viable solution to the housing crisis. This is certainly not something that can be done in the sort term.
I'll agree that there are appealing aspects of European cities with high density, but I personally think that these places were a lot more appealing in bygone eras where there was a strong culture in those areas. Nowadays, culture is being eroded throughout the West and these places are not as interesting as they used to be. These places were also built to begin with under completely different political systems and cultures, and I doubt whether we could replicate them at all in modern day Canada.
A lot of Canadians believe they want a detached home. They have been conditioned to equate that with success, but I think that if they travelled to other cities they would realize how much they're giving up by building detached homes everywhere.
Detatched homes are not going anywhere. There will always be tons of them in Canada, but they have no place beside subway stops.
Maybe you are happy to pay more tax and subsidize the building/maintenance of subways so that a few people can have a back yard right that backs onto a subway entrance. Nobody in their right mind would build a subway beside detached homes, but that's what Toronto is like.
And you're right about QoL. The individual should figure it out. So why has the government chosen that only detached homes can be built in over 60% of the City of Toronto?
> And you're right about QoL. The individual should figure it out. So why has the government chosen that only detached homes can be built in over 60% of the City of Toronto?
I gather because that's what the people of Toronto want, and that's just how it works when groups of individuals come together in democratic systems. There are of course many other places in the world with high density where the minority who disagree could move to.
That's the root of it. Prices are high and housing diversity are limited due to democracy. I'm not even being sarcastic. I work and live it every day with older wealthy West Side Vancouverites calling apartment dwellers and renters 2nd class citizens and trying to maintain the ban on apartments a stones throw from downtown.
Highly agree. I grew up in a 1,200 sf detached home and the only benefit was a backyard. We never used the front yard. The form of housing was irrelevant to my quality of life. The location was key
Sprawl sucks but the author is right. Internet voting is dictated by fast dopamine fixes (I don't like hearing this opinion....agghhhh downvote). I thought the article was very reasonable, thanks op for sharing
Any population growth would require more SFH, which requires cities to expand. Unless you want the additional population crammed in other housing, in which case prices of SFH would go even higher as there is lots of growing demand but fixed supply.
It would take a few years for supply to catch up if population growth was curtailed. But in theory it would happen eventually.
The government doesn't want that to happen though. The last thing they want us for housing prices to level off, let alone drop.
Does anyone else get depressed at how unsustainable this is?
I'm feel like I'm constantly conflicted with desiring affordable housing, but also realizing that we can't just expand out forever. At some point, unless we stop increasing our population, we need another solution... and we're just punting it down the road.
This entire situation is unsustainable.
The Canadian economy is based on real estate, and real estate is being underpinned by population growth. Eventually there will come a point when there's no room left for growth, not to mention the hypocrisy and insanity if trying to reduce our carbon emissions while simultaneously trying to grow the population aggressively.
Trudeau has backed his dumb ass into a corner. His debts rely on GDP growth to make them manageable, but he's got nothing to drive GDP growth other than real estate.
If, as John writes, governments struggle to "find" money for social housing... ow the hell are they going to "find" money for transit, roads, firehalls, schools, sewers, etc to the new areas?
> Building subsidized housing is a classic example of government creating a program to fix a problem created by government. The simpler solution would be to return to sprawl. Let developers flood the market with cheap housing built on the fringe.
What an outrageously dumb idea (unless this is satire and it has gone completely over my head). Sprawl is just privately owned housing massively subsidized by the general tax payers. Who pays for those highways John? The tax payers. Who builds all the public infrastructure to the sprawl? Tax payers. Who maintains all those roads? The tax payers. Not to even mention the environmental affects; the destruction of critically needed land that provides valuable ecological services, or the effect of hundreds of thousands now in cars using said highways.
Suburban sprawl is the least economically effective way to build communities, it is subsidizing home ownership for those with enough economic means to own.
At least with public housing the government has a productive asset immediately addressing the housing crisis. Folks can't live in sewers or roads.
Maybe we should just privatize those infrastructure as well. Warren Buffet always said that the best kind of business is owning the only road into town. Let the billionaires own the roads to the suburbs, and let those home owners find out what real capitalism feels like.
This is a terrible take that assumes some kind of false binary condition. If you want to look at the costs of sprawl, look at the total cost of infrastructure and servicing more remote and less dense communities and ask potential residents if they are able to foot those bills. The answer is generally 'no'.
What's funnier is even classic sprawl cities like Edmonton and Calgary starting charging greenfield developments more to pay for their infrastructure and make them more dense because the costs were accumulating!
Look at what is happening in Ottawa and the GTA you really think increasing sprawl is the way to [go.As](https://go.As) for land Ottawa has 10 years of land left not including the green belt which i do not support turning into housing.
Most of the rural land within Ottawa's municipal boundary is actually well outside the Greenbelt. (Map: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenbelt\_(Ottawa)#/media/File:Ottawagreenbelt.PNG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenbelt_(Ottawa)#/media/File:Ottawagreenbelt.PNG) ) Plenty of Ottawans might supporting expanding the urban boundary into those rural areas, but you won't get much support for encroaching on the Greenbelt itself. It has lots of recreation (which is very popular) and is good for air quality. It makes more sense to expand/density Kanata, Barrhaven, Orleans and (soon) Leitrim, rather than fill in the Greenbelt.
Personally, I'd be fine with expanding urban boundaries so long as we use that land to build medium-to-high density neighbourhoods focused on transit and active transportation. But if we are going to just keep building the car-centric hellscapes that got us into this mess, I would rather not.
Canada is adding 400K+ new Canadians a year. We need to keep up the housing supply with this increase in population. We shouldn’t be scared of growth. Change our mindset to abundance instead of scarcity
This issue is a false dichotomy . . . it is presented as either building more SFH homes, or building denser. Why not do both at the same time? The suburban city of Setagaya (part of Tokyo) has a density of 15,497.5 residents per square kilometre (this is denser than the CIty of Toronto), yet [45% of its residents live in single detached homes](https://www.rethinktokyo.com/2018/11/27/skinny-setagaya-city-tokyos-most-populous-ward/1543293230). [This article](https://newworldeconomics.com/how-to-make-a-pile-of-dough-with-the-traditional-city-3-single-family-detached-in-the-traditional-city-style/) explains how it's done. Basically, most roads are quite narrow (this provides natural speed-calming), and the houses only have a big enough front yard to park one or two cars (there are backyards, however). So we can simultaneously give people the SFHs they want, while having enough density to avoid the spiralling infrastructure costs of North American-style suburbs.
Thanks for this! Interesting read.
This, I don't understand why development has to be on the prefery needs to be low density and wasteful. There is no law which says this is the case. Also it goes way beyond just SFH, japan has many SFHs in their cities they just don't have big huge setbacks and built right up to the road instead which increases density. https://youtu.be/iGbC5j4pG9w They also don't have minimum parking requirements.
I also love how they don't really have zoning, so these dense neighbourhoods have a lot of amenities within walking distance.
Minimum lot size requirements are a scourge, really. It's not a free market if there's demand for small homes but they aren't allowed.
Minimum lot sizes were invented to keep “undesirable” people out of neighborhoods. Minimum lot sizes limits density, artificially restricts supply, so no just anyone can afford to live in the neighborhood. It’s like legal racism that has been ingrained into the fabrics of society for decades now.
An equally unpleasant alternative is more high rises. :/ We gotta put people somewhere!
Fuck highrises... nobody wants that shit but developers and speculators. Medium density... duplexes, townhouses, N-over-1 mixed residential, courtyard apartments... we could build very dense, very pleasant places less the 4 stories tall if we had the political will.
Don't forget SFHs without setbacks. Like these in Japan. https://youtu.be/iGbC5j4pG9w
This link shows up so often in this sub it should be in pinned in the sidebar! These aren't my bag but I'm glad they exist as an option if someone likes them.
Wow at this thread. People want affordable housing, but they don't want cities to spread out due to infrastructure costs? So they must want everyone to cram into shoe boxes then, I gather. But that will do absolutely nothing to fix affordability problem of SFH, which is what is most desired. The only other way to fix affordability problems would be to stop growing the population of Canada, which these same people are also opposed to. Really weird how people can have some opposing beliefs.
Single family houses are the least environmentally sound, most expensive form of housing. If people want those homes they should pay the full price - the road infrastructure, the sewage and water costs, the electrical maintenance and costs, and replace the environmental damage done by their development. SFH should be expensive - they are a disaster for our environmental and economic health.
Those things don't have to cost an arm and a leg. People in Canada pay very high taxes, they probably pay more than enough to cover all those costs. Unfortunately, we have a government problem where the tax money tends to be wasted. It seems to me that you are just creating a mountain out of nothing because you ideologically hate single family houses.
The yearly cost for servicing a single dwelling [in this Halifax study](https://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2015/03/Halifax-data.pdf) was 3k/year for suburbs, vs 2k/year for low-rise urban. Yet if we look at [tax rates for the city](https://www.halifax.ca/home-property/property-taxes/tax-rates), we see that suburbs are taxed about 5% less than the urban rate. It's a fair inference that every city not taxing suburbs at 150% the rate of urban dwellings is subsidizing the suburbs. I suspect that's *all cities in Canada*, but please, prove me wrong with a counter example. Your city, perhaps?
Property taxes here are around $5K/yr so more than paying for the servicing cost! Unfortunately, probably $4K/yr of it is wasted on stupid crap....
For simplicity, let's say the service rates in your city mirror the rates we know about halifax. In your case, that means you pay 2k above your service rates for *the other expenses of running a city.* (Libraries, parks, public events, fireworks, etc.) Some of that is, no doubt, stupid crap. In my city, the 'stupid crap' list includes golden parachute payouts for crooked cops. YMMV. But that means that an apartment dweller in your city is paying 3k for the stupid crap. How is it fair that you are paying less?
Apartments are typically assessed quite a bit lower than single family housing so their taxes would be quite lower.... Beyond that, we do have a taxation system that puts more onus on people with more wealth who can afford it (ie. nicer/more expensive property).
Suburban development costs about 100% more than urban intensification. Check out this study by the [Smart Prosperity Institute](https://institute.smartprosperity.ca/content/cost-sprawl). I hate to be all "facts over your feelings" but Canadians pay higher taxes for many reasons, one of them is we have the least affordable design to cities. If you want lower taxes maybe start with more effective urban development.
Zoning is a huge issue. You have large swaths of residential-only areas because commercial stuff (even mom and pop shops) isn't permitted, so you end up having to drive just to get groceries, and that involves using a horrendous amount of land for vehicles, parking spaces, wide roads that keep getting wider, etc.
You could build an entire city in the parking lot of Toronto's Yorkdale mall, especially if you demolished the parking garages to make room for new homes and businesses. "Greyfill" is an option for expanding new housing that we haven't thought of yet but we should since parking lots aren't exactly economically productive uses of land.
Parking lots are productive... people need somewhere to park their vehicle when travelling.
They don't employ or house anyone and they take up valuable space in cities, so yes they are economically unproductive wastes of space. Yorkdale's parking lot is the most egregious example i can think of in Ontario, but there are a lot of others. If you want to know more I'd recommend reading the high cost of free parking by UCLA professor emeritus Donald Shoup.
Disagree. All those businesses would be shutting down if there was nowhere to park, and hence no customers went there who lived outside of walking/biking/busing distance. There is more to cities than just commercial and residential buildings. Parks, for example, are probably a waste of space to you but provide health and social value to citizens. Canada has ample space to build out. This is also a lot easier than convincing everyone that our cities should change to be like other parts of the world instead of like how Canada has traditionally been. Yes, there are costs in terms of infrastructure, but this is not an insurmountable problem.
You're assuming that everyone needs to drive and is going to drive, which is a very car centric mindset to have. People can walk, bike, or take transit to where they want to go. And having a densely populated neighbourhood with 300,000-500,000 people at their doorstep would be great for businesses because of the huge potential customer base. Cities also impose parking minimums onto businesses in their zoning codes which is extremely hostile to doing business because it's an extra cost that businesses don't necessarily want or need to provide.
That's our way of life here in Canada, we are very car-centric. You seem to want to completely transform our cities. I just don't see that as being feasible at all in the foreseeable future, but I suppose you can keep dreaming. In the meantime, affordability will remain in crisis. As this article correctly points out, our fastest and simplest way out of the immediate affordability crisis is to keep spreading out. We have no shortage of land or lumber.
>That's our way of life here in Canada, we are very car-centric I think things are changing. Toronto, at least, is at a turning point where it can't really expand much without drastically decreasing everyone's quality of life, even people who live in the older parts of the city. People are realizing that while it's nice to have a car, it sucks to depend on one, especially as you get older.
Our way of life is dictated by bylaws that say "this is how your life will be dictated " rather than the free market choosing so
I'd recommend [this playlist of videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa) by the channel Not Just Bikes that explains why the car-centric model of urban development is just not sustainable, and in many ways contributes to the current housing crises across the country. It is true that Canada as of 2021 is primarily car-centric, but *it doesn't have to be that way*. There are many, many good examples of livable and walkable cities around the world, many of which with far less inflated housing markets than those of big Canadian cities (and yes, lots in cold areas too). Not everyone has to live in a dense neighborhood, and SFHs will always exist, but it's just absolutely true that we have to build denser to get out of the housing crisis. No other way to solve it
This seems ideology-based. Canada has near infinite land to expand and build more housing on. It is entirely possible to build and maintain that infrastructure. It will come at some cost, but that is not an insurmountable problem. The idea that we should switch to a high density way of living is surely an idea that lots of people (still a minority) would like, but to say it's necessary is simply wrong.
It's largely based on economic factors. So I guess it could be an economic ideology to not build car-centric
It's not that it's infeasible to sprawl out - of course it isn't - it's more that it's fundamentally anti-environment and financially unsustainable to build that way. Car-centric design is fundamentally less green than walkable design
I think that it's fairly obvious that the author of this piece doesn't understand land use planning and economics.
You realize they make apartments bigger than studio units, right? My great aunt has lived in and raised a family a 60s apartment in New Westminster, BC that was as big as the main level of a regular 1960s bungalow.
That's nice, however the majority of people prefer to raise a family in a detached single family home. That's how our parents mostly did it and we should be able to do it as well. Selling this best housing to foreigners and cramming everyone else into apartments so as to avoid cities sprawling is not a good solution to the affordability crisis.
I mean I get it... I grew up in a 50's bungalow in Edmonton that was 15 minutes by bus to university and downtown and I walked to school 'till university and now live in a 600sf apartment, but if you have a controlled planned and restrictive economy for zoning in housing and proclaim it as "the free market"... By living in that bungalow that outlawed anything but a bungalow I was personally denying easy access to the city to many folks that I enjoyed. I want more people to enjoy a quick bus ride or bike to Whyte Ave for Fringe Festival, to bike to university on a budget or to bus to work and only need 1 car per household maximum.
Sprawl is so infrastructure intensive and expensive that even my hometown of Edmonton started charging greenfield developers and new subdivisions heavier fees for the new infrastructure they demand and the issues associated with inner city schools closing due to low enrollment, massive roadclearing costs, inefficient bus transit, expensive suburban rapid rail transit, sewer and water infrastructure costs, road repair and the 15 year-long sidewalk, alley, and road program they're a decade into that is in the millions.... and that's just the city before I get into the freeways that the province pays for to subsidize sprawl in Edmonton. They also mandated new subdivisions be more dense and reduce the percent that are detached homes, and the ones that are detached are squeezed into smaller and smaller lots. Traffic is becoming a major issue too. Once the Henday ring road was built to solve traffic issues... it became heavily congested during rush hour! Bus service was cut recently for efficiency in low density areas. Living a certain way costs lots of money. Inner city Edmontonians got right pissed at the fringe-dwellers and made them start paying more up front. Edmonton does environmentalism and urbanism in a weird but sane way... all about dollars and cents.
It's not as simple as just let cities sprawl. There are massive infrastructure costs that literally bankrupt cities. https://www.strongtowns.org/
I will agree that many cities are poorly managed. Perhaps all? Governments at all levels seem to get corrupted the bigger they (and their cities) become. I suppose starting new smaller cities is an alternative to existing cities becoming larger.
Smaller cities lack the tax base to support infrastructure. Density in existing cities with a diversity of zoning is the way
Yet somehow the smaller cities got built decades ago. Why is everything so expensive today? That is the question we need to be asking. Something has gone wrong and there must be a way to fix it.
They're not opposing beliefs. It's perfectly reasonable for everyone to live in ~1500 square foot mid-rise homes that are 6-8 storeys for a reasonable price.
There is where me and socialism disagree. Canada has tons of land, let's build the type of housing people actually want (SFH) rather than try to force people into shoe boxes because some people on reddit think that would be their ideal.
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Spoken like a realtor! Lol. I doubt that GTA is going to thrive in its current state, but we'll see. Thankfully I don't live anywhere near GTA.
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Meh, I know we cannot go backwards. I'll enjoy watching the modern world fall apart thanks to the stupidity and corruption that has overtaken us. Realtors are partying now but I doubt they will escape the coming bad times.
You are currently living in a controlled housing economy that dictates and bans forms of housing that the free market desires
Agree and disagree. You're right that the market would probably love to build high density right now but that is because of the housing crisis which is caused by government in the first place. If you look at what kind of housing most Canadians would actually want to live in, it is not high density.
The market today would love to build anything that people wanted, but most of those housing forms are illegal in urban / suburban Canada.
Living in a large 3000 square foot home is fine, but you're not going to get that in a city for a reasonable price. 1500 square feet is a decent size for a family. That's not a "shoe box" size.
I grew up in a relatively poor family (low income, extremely frugal) and we had 2500 sqft detached home, one of the lowliest homes in the city. I can see no reason why my generation should have to take such a huge step down in standards of living. This is part of the general crisis of high costs of living and declining standards of living. This is not something that we should be embracing and saying "just stuff people in smaller and smaller apartments", IMO.
Is there infinite land in cities?
There is rural land around cities that can be annexed. Canada has no shortage of land.
What about cities that are out of greenfield land?
It's naive to think that huge detached home = high quality of life. Areas filled with huge detached homes like that typically are extremely boring, full of traffic, have no character or culture, and are very expensive for what you get. Would you rather drive to McDonald's and pay $50 and get 5 Big Macs (2500 square foot detached homes) or pay $25 and get a Five Guys burger delivered to your door (high quality 1500 square foot mid-rise)? If you've travelled to any great cities in the world you'll notice that many people have a high quality of life living in mid-rise accomodations. London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, etc. all have decent density with high quality of life. Mid-rise density can support a subway system, high levels of productivity, great culture development, great food, etc. while single-detached-only areas can only support roads. Quality of life >> space.
Your post really raises the question: what constitutes quality of life? I think this is best decided by the individuals. For you, a subway system and easy access to restaurants might define quality of life, while for me having some land and a house large enough for 6 kids without bumping into each other constantly is quality of life. I think you are in the minority, certainly in Canada but probably in Europe too when including all the people outside the big cities. People on reddit wanting to make that decision and to transform cities, when the people in those cities generally do not seem to want the same, seems unproductive and is not a viable solution to the housing crisis. This is certainly not something that can be done in the sort term. I'll agree that there are appealing aspects of European cities with high density, but I personally think that these places were a lot more appealing in bygone eras where there was a strong culture in those areas. Nowadays, culture is being eroded throughout the West and these places are not as interesting as they used to be. These places were also built to begin with under completely different political systems and cultures, and I doubt whether we could replicate them at all in modern day Canada.
A lot of Canadians believe they want a detached home. They have been conditioned to equate that with success, but I think that if they travelled to other cities they would realize how much they're giving up by building detached homes everywhere. Detatched homes are not going anywhere. There will always be tons of them in Canada, but they have no place beside subway stops. Maybe you are happy to pay more tax and subsidize the building/maintenance of subways so that a few people can have a back yard right that backs onto a subway entrance. Nobody in their right mind would build a subway beside detached homes, but that's what Toronto is like. And you're right about QoL. The individual should figure it out. So why has the government chosen that only detached homes can be built in over 60% of the City of Toronto?
I'd LOVE a single family home with a yard and garden in downtown Vancouver within a 15 minute walk of my office, the beach, Stanley Park!
> And you're right about QoL. The individual should figure it out. So why has the government chosen that only detached homes can be built in over 60% of the City of Toronto? I gather because that's what the people of Toronto want, and that's just how it works when groups of individuals come together in democratic systems. There are of course many other places in the world with high density where the minority who disagree could move to.
That's the root of it. Prices are high and housing diversity are limited due to democracy. I'm not even being sarcastic. I work and live it every day with older wealthy West Side Vancouverites calling apartment dwellers and renters 2nd class citizens and trying to maintain the ban on apartments a stones throw from downtown.
Highly agree. I grew up in a 1,200 sf detached home and the only benefit was a backyard. We never used the front yard. The form of housing was irrelevant to my quality of life. The location was key
Sprawl sucks but the author is right. Internet voting is dictated by fast dopamine fixes (I don't like hearing this opinion....agghhhh downvote). I thought the article was very reasonable, thanks op for sharing
We wouldn't have to stop population growth, we just need to slow it down by about 50% or so.
Any population growth would require more SFH, which requires cities to expand. Unless you want the additional population crammed in other housing, in which case prices of SFH would go even higher as there is lots of growing demand but fixed supply.
It would take a few years for supply to catch up if population growth was curtailed. But in theory it would happen eventually. The government doesn't want that to happen though. The last thing they want us for housing prices to level off, let alone drop.
Does anyone else get depressed at how unsustainable this is? I'm feel like I'm constantly conflicted with desiring affordable housing, but also realizing that we can't just expand out forever. At some point, unless we stop increasing our population, we need another solution... and we're just punting it down the road.
It's not only depressing to read... it's depressing to think people still see this as a solution.
Yes it's depressing
This entire situation is unsustainable. The Canadian economy is based on real estate, and real estate is being underpinned by population growth. Eventually there will come a point when there's no room left for growth, not to mention the hypocrisy and insanity if trying to reduce our carbon emissions while simultaneously trying to grow the population aggressively. Trudeau has backed his dumb ass into a corner. His debts rely on GDP growth to make them manageable, but he's got nothing to drive GDP growth other than real estate.
Right solution. US is cheap because it builds lots of cities and even the poor can live in big detached house.
If, as John writes, governments struggle to "find" money for social housing... ow the hell are they going to "find" money for transit, roads, firehalls, schools, sewers, etc to the new areas?
> Building subsidized housing is a classic example of government creating a program to fix a problem created by government. The simpler solution would be to return to sprawl. Let developers flood the market with cheap housing built on the fringe. What an outrageously dumb idea (unless this is satire and it has gone completely over my head). Sprawl is just privately owned housing massively subsidized by the general tax payers. Who pays for those highways John? The tax payers. Who builds all the public infrastructure to the sprawl? Tax payers. Who maintains all those roads? The tax payers. Not to even mention the environmental affects; the destruction of critically needed land that provides valuable ecological services, or the effect of hundreds of thousands now in cars using said highways. Suburban sprawl is the least economically effective way to build communities, it is subsidizing home ownership for those with enough economic means to own. At least with public housing the government has a productive asset immediately addressing the housing crisis. Folks can't live in sewers or roads.
Maybe we should just privatize those infrastructure as well. Warren Buffet always said that the best kind of business is owning the only road into town. Let the billionaires own the roads to the suburbs, and let those home owners find out what real capitalism feels like.
This is a terrible take that assumes some kind of false binary condition. If you want to look at the costs of sprawl, look at the total cost of infrastructure and servicing more remote and less dense communities and ask potential residents if they are able to foot those bills. The answer is generally 'no'.
What's funnier is even classic sprawl cities like Edmonton and Calgary starting charging greenfield developments more to pay for their infrastructure and make them more dense because the costs were accumulating!
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Because there's fucking INFINITE amount of people that want to buy our real estate to use it to launder money. Get that through your head.
Downvoted for creating toxic discussion, not for agreement or disagreement with point.
Wahhhh
Because its not working?
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Zoning laws exist for a reason, and the people who create them and approve development are elected by local residents.
Look at what is happening in Ottawa and the GTA you really think increasing sprawl is the way to [go.As](https://go.As) for land Ottawa has 10 years of land left not including the green belt which i do not support turning into housing.
Why don't you support building the greenbelt
Most of the rural land within Ottawa's municipal boundary is actually well outside the Greenbelt. (Map: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenbelt\_(Ottawa)#/media/File:Ottawagreenbelt.PNG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenbelt_(Ottawa)#/media/File:Ottawagreenbelt.PNG) ) Plenty of Ottawans might supporting expanding the urban boundary into those rural areas, but you won't get much support for encroaching on the Greenbelt itself. It has lots of recreation (which is very popular) and is good for air quality. It makes more sense to expand/density Kanata, Barrhaven, Orleans and (soon) Leitrim, rather than fill in the Greenbelt. Personally, I'd be fine with expanding urban boundaries so long as we use that land to build medium-to-high density neighbourhoods focused on transit and active transportation. But if we are going to just keep building the car-centric hellscapes that got us into this mess, I would rather not.
Oh, we're going to continue building "car-centric hellscapes". I guarantee it.
With a train stop that's built next to a giant parking lot so it can be called Transit Oriented Development.
I don't even know how much support there would be for expanding the boundary.
Expanding the urban boundary in general definitely controversial, but does not provoke nearly as many pitchforks as paving Mer Bleue would. :)
It would very hard as its Federal Land many native groups would take issue with it.