this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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I think this is a symptom and not the problem itself.
The issue is that residential zoning only allows for single family homes to be built. No mixed use, no apartments/condos. Just a house for one family with a front and back yard. I mean, who even uses their front yard? I used to live in a house like that and I've never seen anybody actually use their front yard aside from mowing it. It's a chore to keep people busy designed during the cold war to prevent people from noticing any commie propaganda or thinking that the establishment as it is might not be the best thing for them. A surprisingly useful HAI video You can build an entire house in the space of a front lawn.
If the zoning restriction didn't exist, you could build two or three townhouses on a single plot of land, or even an apartment building by combining two plots. We would litterally have more than a million new homes if we simply replaced all the single family houses with low-rise apartments. Make that a mix of mid and high-rises and we can house the entire Canadian population in Toronto or Vancouver.
Despite how dense Toronto seems, there are huge tracks of land that are completely underutilized, and I'm not talking about parks. Leaside Business Park alone is a good hectare and there is almost nothing but one-story buildings, most of which have empty yards not doing anything. This isn't the only place Toronto (and near the middle of the city at that) has.
In what way does Toronto seem dense? It is laughably sparse. It struggles to fill 4,000 people per square kilometre. If we look at an actual city, there are over one million people per square kilometre. Even the wannabe cities of the world have 40,000 people per square kilometre. Toronto is a wannabe farmer's field. Which is no doubt why its people are always calling for the TTC to deploy more tractors.
Which, all of that, is to say that you're right, but prior to 2007 it didn't matter because you could just keep sprawling for basically no cost. Until the people of Toronto get past wishing they were farmers, which is unlikely to happen... ever, they will be at the mercy of those who are actually (dairy, poultry) farmers with a government granting them free money. Good luck.
The public perception of Toronto is that it is a top tier and dense urban city. The truth is far from that, even just outside the downtown core the density drops sharply.
That's what I'm saying. I agree completely that Toronto is stupidly spread out, but most people think Toronto isn't like that, especially hearing what people who haven't really seen Toronto thinks. This is why I'm saying that it's easy to fix Toronto's housing problems. We have the space for it. More than enough space within the GTA to house the entire Canadian population.
Not only is this cheaper and more efficient use of space, but it'll even bring in the city more money, rather than costing the province loads of money and only making the rich even richer.
Of course, at the same time, it is completely understandable why the average Joe doesn't want such density. Illustratively, density means you only need one bakery instead of hundreds of bakeries spread across the city in a sparsely populated city, or thousands of bakeries spread across the rural countryside. This means wealth inequality. Instead of hundreds or thousands of people owning bakeries, one person owns the one bakery.
Which, of course, is also the draw of the city. Owning the one bakery enables you to become mega rich! But it is a double-edged sword, as if you fail to become the owner of the one bakery then you are left in a precarious spot of owning nothing productive. Whereas in a sparsely populated area, more people can own bakeries. But the pool of customers shrinks in kind, so wealth inequality shrinks, thus you cannot become nearly as rich.
Rural areas provide the greatest wealth equality (at least when the government isn't handing special interests money printers) and therefore the least wealth capacity, and actual cities provide the greatest wealth inequality and therefore the greatest wealth capacity. The people of Toronto seek something somewhere in the middle to allow some wealth inequality for a small handful to become still quite staggeringly, but perhaps not mega, rich. They do not want to go all the way to full bore wealth inequality, however. They want the average Joe to still have some kind of chance.
Toronto already has one of the lowest median incomes in the country. It has some people doing really well, but a lot doing very, very poorly. Densification will only widen that gap. Housing may become cheaper, but if you lose even more access to capital, what's the point? Living in a tent and owning capital is clearly better than having a nice house, but having no capital.
While I presume that it's an extreme example, I'd rather have a nice home but no capital than a tent with plenty. After all, that home itself is a form of capital in the first place, but a tent is a pretty low standard of living, especially being a person who values owning some nice electronics and a good internet connection.
That said, while I do get your idea of equality, this is entirely localized equality, and has nothing to do with the greater level of wealth inequality. Suburbia only exists due to rich downtowns subsidizing them. This isn't the 18th century where you could get away with having a public well and firewood as the only government resources provided to support your businesses. You need proper sewage, electricity, roads, and a wide variety of other government services just for a suburb to exist, including that small-time bakery that probably only barely makes enough money to keep three types of bread on the shelves. Compared to the single bakery that has four dozen loafs, buns, and cakes that pays six figures in rent a year.
And that doesn't take into consideration that I personally believe that mixed use buildings are the best as well. Rather than dedicated buildings for commercial and housing, you make the first floor of every building commercial, and the upper floors for homes. This way, you can even have small little bakeries every few blocks thanks to the abundance of commercial space, yet have them be both highly profitable and taxable due to the high density of local housing. People don't have to drive 10 minutes just to get some bread (in which case they won't bother and just go to the local super store once a week, killing the local bakeries anyways). It's always in the suburbs that local businesses die and are replaced by megamalls and other super-sized stores. Because if it's not in walking distance, it's not worth going to unless if you can do all your weekly shopping there at once.
Where's the equality when one Wallmart took over two dozen family businesses?
I understand the appeal of having a nice house with a yard, but I think that the option for just a decent home at a decent price should also be available to those who want them. Suburbia isn't going away as we're not turning them back into farmland, and Toronto's low density districts (especially the commercial parts) can easily be transformed into high density mixed use housing that'll make the city far more livable, and give far more opportunities.
It's not even a little equal when the only homes that are made are all starting at a price point that requires six figure salaries, especially if they're being subsidized by those who are already paying a higher percentage of their wages in taxes.
Technically true, but of no greater capital utility than the tent. The home carries some capital premium as it should have a longer lifetime, but what's that? Even if you bought a new tent every week, that's, what, maybe $200,000 over the course of your adult life? So if you accept paying much more than $200,000 for a home you're being economically foolish.
And, to be fair, I suppose an economy should allow people to be foolish. You have to have some fun sometimes. But is a house really where you want sink your fun? I can think of a long list of things that are more fun that erecting a structure that then becomes a job to maintain forevermore.
Exactly. Walmart could not exist without some level of urban density. There is good reason you don't see them setting up in the middle of the Boreal forest. We are sparse enough that there is some, albeit limited, room for others to sell similar goods, but if you crank up the density there will be no need and all you will have is Walmart.
As before, we've chosen to walk the middle road by being sparse, but not extreme countryside sparse. We want some wealth inequality. We don't want total wealth inequality. We like to have the Walmarts of the world. But we also want to give some opportunity to others.
Most Walmarts are in suburbs. They actually don't do as well in heavily urbanized areas. At the very least, I've never seen one in downtown Toronto. The taxes for the amount of land they need alone destroys their profits, but in the suburbs they can take an entire block at next to zero cost and serve a good 10-20km radius because who cares about going an extra km if you can do all your shopping in one trip than two, whereas if everything is in walking distance, who cares about walking an extra block to get one little thing while you're out doing something else like working.
I'm talking about being against suburbia and for high density urbanization. Did you know that bike lanes actually increase profits of small local businesses compared to increasing the lanes of roads? You can't have bikes in suburbia because everything is too far away to bike to. But in high density urban environments, biking is far preferred to cars.
And also, you argue tents for cost, but did you know the average home in downtown Tokyo is only $300k? Few places are denser than Tokyo, yet some of the best parts of it you can buy four detached houses for the cost of a house in Toronto. I know I'm going all over the place, but frankly speaking, all the problems we're dealing with in Canada with housing and life affordability are things that have been solved in other places, and we can easily learn from if there was the political will to do so.
Laughable. Tokyo only has 6,000 people per square kilometre. Slightly less farmer field than Toronto, but only just. In fact, fewer places are more sprawling than Tokyo. Have you not seen how much land it wastes?
Kowloon Walled City has 1,346,000 people per square kilometre. Now that's a city! Manila has 70,000 people per square kilometre. Small town numbers, but at least respectable.
4-6,000 people? You're not even in the running. That is only just slightly more populated than a rural area.
I was talking about Tokyo city. Not the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, or the Tokyo District. They're pretty different things, and is like talking about the GTA or Southern Ontario when talking about Toronto.
And Kowloon Walled City was a dystopia caused by people not being allowed to leave for generations. That, and it doesn't exist anymore. There's no point on using it as an example when it makes every other high density city look like farmland in comparison. And being the single only example in the same ballpark.
Anyways, of all the things to respond to, you chose that. How reductive.
Seems its most dense parts top out at around 15,000 people per. Still amateur hour compared to most reasonably dense communities, which, as I said before, have more like 40,000 people.
Right, I think we can all agree that nobody actually wants to live in a city. City population densities have actually shrunk considerably over the years as people long for more and more space. Rural living is clearly considered the ideal by the masses, but with the pitfall of there being essentially no wealth inequality. As such, we seek some kind of middle ground of slightly more density than a farmer's field to enable that.
But if you want to embrace city life, you may as well go for it. Why pussyfoot around with such low densities?
I'm sorry, but using a city that the living conditions are actually worse than in any dystopian movie is not something you should be using as an example for modern living conditions.
But if you want to embrace city life, you may as well go for it. Why pussyfoot around with such low densities?> And yes, I don't pussyfoot for such low densities. I keep championing mixed use mid-rise buildings to replace all low density housing within our cities. Separated individual houses are a waste if you live within 10km of a major city's downtown. And if you want to live in a giant personal box in the middle of nowhere, you should properly pay for it instead of having half its costs subsidized by those who live where its cheaper to have your utilities installed.