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Why urban density is actually good for us
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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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This feels like a dishonest interpretation that misses a lot of the nuance presented in the article.
I also don't understand how that person came to their conclusion based off of:
"We should allow mixed-use buildings of at least six storeys in all our neighbourhoods—and ensure that they are not only easier to approve, but also more viable to build. "
From this sentence preceding it where they're describing their optimal density model:
Yeah but midrise apartments are by definition more popular?
Again, not to the people who already live in neighbourhoods comprised of single family homes. "Solving" the housing crisis by simply changing zoning laws in those neighbourhoods has the effect of making the property unaffordable for a single person to buy so then developers buy the homes and tear them down and turn them into midrises.
Yes, we do need do build more mid rises and their should be more mixed into those neighbourhoods, but if your solution to the housing crisis is just to cram a million tiny homes into the same space you're just participating in a race to the bottom.
Most people don't want to live their whole life in an apartment with no green space. We should be solving the housing crisis by building enough of the type of housing we actually want to live in, which might mean building more Vancouvers and Torontos instead of just tearing them down and replacing them with Manahattans or Parises.
Who gives a fuck about rich nimby dickheads who would rather see people homeless than see people housed?
The 6 poor families that could afford to have stable living conditions on the plot of land your single family home sit on outweigh your opinion 6 to 1. They'd rather have a home.
Stop projecting your idea of "good housing" onto the rest of us: the overwhelming majority of us live in cities and are interested in stability over 1 acre of useless yard.
Because the solution to the problem directly effects what is affordable. It doesn't take a rich person to afford the building / material cost of a house, the cost of housing and what is and isn't affordable is a product of the societal infrastructure we build.
Why could my grandparents afford a great big plot of land on a poor single salary? Why could my parents afford a small row house on two even poorer salaries? Why can I struggle to barely afford a condo despite making more than all of them combined by this point in their career? Because we haven't built any new cities, mass transit, or walkable infrastructure in like 30 years in this country.
Why are you racing to turn pleasant cities that people chose to move to, into crammed slums? Why not pressure the government to build more cities and build more transit infrastructure in existing smaller cities to make more Torontos and Vancouvers rather than tear down the existing cities and replace them with manhattans or barcelonas?
We need to densify, but the cold hard reality of the situation is that living in a shoebox with no greenspace is not pleasant or mentally healthy for people. There's a reason that apartment buildings like Habitat 67 have like a 0% turnover rate, compared to soulless glass rectangles in the sky, because even people living in smaller apartments like their own yard and greenspace. You want to accommodate our population by letting everyone in the suburbs chill in their mcmansions, and tearing down existing relatively dense housing in the middle of the cities, and further densify it, I'd rather us invest in more transit infrastructure in underserved suburbs and small towns and turn them into other mid sized walkable cities.
Suburbs are not economically viable, they are being subsidized by denser areas.
I am tired of living in a cramped appartment suffering the traffic caused by suburbanites 24/7, all while knowing that us appartment dwellers are actually subsidizing suburban sprawl. Do you want to live in a single family home? Great; pay your fair share.
Like the article tells, you are subsiding them because you are much, much richer. It is not at all unusual to see the rich pay more than the poor.
They can always be de-annexed. The fact that you haven't done that tells us that, for all your complaining, deep down you know they are valuable to you. Perhaps the access to that additional labour pool outside of the city centre is even the reason why the core is so wealthy?
Yes, and believe it or not there is an in-between between unsustainable suburbs, and cramped shoebox apartments, it's called town and row houses and it's what the article is proposing tearing down in downtown Toronto and Vancouver to replace with more cramped shoebox apartment buildings.
We can also build larger appartments suitable for families. It is not rocket science.
Not that I have anything against mid-density mixed-use developments, quite the contrary. But in the downtown I can see why even taller buildings make sense.
It's the sprawl of necessarily car-dependent single-family homes that I have a problem with, because while it means comfort for the rich, it only brings externalities for everybody else.
I completely agree with that, but you're not going to solve that problem by tearing down all the single family homes that exist in our current cities. Many of the people who get priced out of their homes will just move to the suburbs and small towns and balloon them further.
Yes we can afford and need to densify around existing infrastructure, to some extent, but we also desperately and urgently need to start building transit infrastructure in small towns and connecting them to our big cities so that we can have a region of mid sized cities, all capable of supporting a walkable lifestyle. Just densifying around existing transit without investing in building new regions is a race to the bottom that will benefit the rich landlords that lease those buildings back to us.
"I" is the first thing that stands out. It took two in both other cases.
Some arbitrary number might be larger, but what makes you think you are actually making more than them?
Just about everything we produce has plummeted in cost since your grandparents' time thanks to removing more and more of the human element from the process. For example, in your grandparents' time, food was around 50% of the average family's budget. 30% in your parent's time. Today, 10%.
We've failed to scale the production of houses, however. It takes essentially as much labour to build one today as 200 years ago. This has left the actual cost of housing to remain fairly stable.
If just about everything else you buy costs a fraction of what it would have cost your grandparents, and your parents to a lesser extent, and you still cannot afford a house (or just barely), that suggests that you are making way, way, way less than they.
Knowing our salaries adjusted for inflation and/or cost of living, the numbers aren't that close.
In my grandparent's time a family budget consisted of 40 hours of salaried labour a week, today it consists of 80.
Again though, that's not very much. It costs like $150k to build a small brand new house, let alone buy a run down used townhouse, yet in places like Toronto or Vancouver that will run you upwards of a million dollars. That disparity between the real building cost of housing and the market value is why I can't afford a house when my parents could and why I've spend far more of my income thus far on over inflated rent then they had to.
That is a result of the fact that we are in a reactionary feedback loop where we let demand drive infrastructure investment instead of building infrastructure where we want it to go. We do not need to densify Toronto and Vancouver to be unrecognizable on the scale of Paris or Barcelona or Manhattan if we densify ours suburbs and turn our huge swaths of land taken up by existing small towns and cities into Torontos and Vancouvers.
We put a greenbelt around Toronto to stop urban sprawl (great!) but we did nothing to connect Toronto to other cities outside the greenbelt or to connect them to each other, leaving runaway demand for the only livable walkable city for hundreds of km, that also has nowhere to build.
Who even makes that suggestion, anyway? That's a pretty mischaracterization on what density means. There's a very wide spectrum in between "detached single-family homes" and your dystopic vision of "a million tiny homes". You talk of "crammed slums", but the nicest areas of the most desirable cities in the world are quite dense. So how about putting actual numbers on that density? Otherwise you're just getting angry over a meaningless word.
The article. Just follow the trajectory of what's being proposed.
We remove all zoning restrictions throughout cities that have ever increasing density, and tight greenbelts preventing further expansion. We don't build other regional hubs to connect them to, continuing to drive all regional traffic through these primary hubs that are experiencing ever increasing density and congestion, making it harder to travel around the region, making the hub the only spot that's convenient to live, driving more demand to live there.
Manhattan's density is the end result of a failure of regional planning and runaway feedback loops that have allowed demand for a region to get out of control to the point that they've created literal permanent twighlight at street level.
Now the article does propose capping the limit at 6 stories, which would prevent the full manhattanization of a city, but would instead more quickly lead to a paris or barcelona where all single family homes, be they dense townhouses, or sprawling in city suburban ranches, be torn up and replaced with apartments and condos. Not only will this destroy some of our quite frankly mostly nicely balanced housing from a density / quality of life standpoint (the dense townhomes and streetcar suburbs), but failing to put any controls on how the process of people being priced out of their homes and letting the market do the work is having the impact of shifting more and more power to landlords and corporate real estate which then further extract money from the general public since they have the resources to exploit this inelastic demand.
Again, I'm not saying we don't need to densify, nor that we shouldn't be building a lot more midrises (and even some high rises), but we also need to recognize that virtually every major city in Canada is grappling with a hub and spoke regional model that provides no outlet valves and creates feedback loops driving unsustainable and unpleasant pressure instead of spreading it through a region in a more balanced way and a lot of the calls for complete removal of zoning laws are coming from developers who simply want to build cheap shit to lease back to you at a profit.
I don't understand. Does the article say or does the article not say that we should "cram a million tiny homes into the same space"?
Apparently the answer is no...? The trajectory does, whatever that means?
It means following a logical train of thought to it's conclusions.
You got yours, so F everyone else? Classic ladder-yanker prattle.
Don't have one, just would like to at some point, and that won't happen if you buy the developer propaganda and rush for a future where the only housing available is shoe box apartments.
The "show box" is the only way. Sorry. It happened when we overpopulated the heck out of this planet and started taking agro land for sprawling ticky tack housing.
It's really objectively not. Tour through small town Ontario / Canada and look at how many Walmart parking lots the size of city blocks there are. We could build a region of compact mid sized cities with greenbelts around them and spread the load throughout the region, but instead of building the transit infrastructure to make that viable we just cede control of housing to corporate real estate investors.
Ah, so Paris grew up.