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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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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.
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.
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?
"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.