this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023

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Why urban density is actually good for us (www.straight.com)

submitted 1 year ago by RehRomano@lemmy.ca to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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[–] ttmrichter@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

She's right.

Density isn't the enemy. Bad arrangement of dense population is.

I live in a very densely-populated city (1200/km² or 3200/sq.mi.) but it's arranged semi-sanely. Within comfortable walking distance of my home are two parks, a Daoist temple, several schools at levels ranging from primary to 2nd-tier university, two (large!) farmer's markets, three shopping centres (two of which have sizable supermarkets), uncountable numbers of restaurants ranging from holes in the wall to fancy banquet halls... You get the idea. Within 3 stops of the nearest subway station or 5 stops of the nearest bus stop all that expands dramatically. I'm not sure I could even realistically count them all except to say that it doubles the number of Daoist temples and adds a sizable Buddhist one. (The nearest church is about 5 subway stops away, maybe 6.) Outside of work (which is an hour's commute by subway and bus away) I could live my entire life without being more than 20 minutes away from my home ... and never be bored or finding myself in a rut.

I can't say the same for Ottawa when I lived there. Hell, within fifteen minutes of DRIVING I couldn't find much in most of the places I lived.

[–] Rocket@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

1200/km² or 3200/sq.mi.

At first you had me thinking, there is no way 1,200/km² is very densely-populated. That's like small town where everyone has a big lawn in the front and a pool in the back kind of numbers. But then I read 3,200/sq mi and realized you flipped the units.

That said, even 1,200/km² is perfectly dense enough to allow walkability to everything if done right. But the appeal of being a farmer is too great for the average person. They want to have to get into a vehicle every time they go to do something.

[–] ttmrichter@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Flipped the units? I've never seen density measures as km²/person! Where are you seeing density measured as area per person?

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But the appeal of being a farmer is too great for the average person. They want to have to get into a vehicle every time they go to do something.

We're getting to the point where that's neither here nor there because however much they want that, people can't afford it.

[–] Rocket@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That is true, but they are not going to down without a fight. Which is why we are seeing more and more "But please sir, if I can't have car, at least how about a new train? I can't be seen walking like pleb."

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

What we really need in Canada is for companies and jobs to spread out across multiple cities in Canada instead of being all concentrated in Toronto.

Then maybe everyone and their grandmother and all immigrants won't be trying to cram themselves into one small place in a country that has one of the largest areas on earth.

[–] RehRomano@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The point of this article is we can and should make room in Toronto. There’s plenty of space if we accommodate with a better built form that isn’t sprawling detached homes.

[–] pbjamm@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Building density is not as simple as just putting up more apartment buildings. it requires planning for how to expand schools, make sure that utilities are not over burdened, traffic congestion and ways to mitigate it etc. Expanding suburbs have all the same problems and more. It absolutely can be done, but doing it right requires proper preparation otherwise you create new and different problems.

[–] Noodle07@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's cold in Canada, that's why everybody stick together to keep warm

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

🤦 Alright here ya go ⬆️

Now get outta here.

[–] Noodle07@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That’s on the government to build out cities in remote locations and then have extremely low costs for people/businesses to bring them in

Also needs high speed commercial rail between the cities

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We HAVE other cities across Canada already that could be used as other locations for companies. We don't need to build more.

What the government needs to do is provide incentives for companies to move. But that could mean job losses in Toronto/Ontario. Would they be willing to make that sacrifice? I don't think so.

I agree with the high speed rail thing though.

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ontario needs intermediaries between Toronto/Ottawa and Thunder Bay

The niche is currently occupied by Sudbury and Sault which isn’t ideal

There also isn’t really anything connecting to Hudson Bay/NW Passage (goes for the other provinces)

[–] rbesfe@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Toronto easily has space to grow to 4 million residents plus. There are vast swaths of Canada's largest city that are built like some far-flung suburb, and that needs to change sooner rather than later

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Will you forget about Toronto already???

Toronto isn't the only place in Canada where people live.

Fuck. It's no wonder everyone else in Canada hates Torontonians. It's like you guys think you're the only ones in the whole goddamn country.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

In context, the focus on Toronto as an example makes sense.

Give the guy a pass this time.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

Calgary is on it.

[–] Tackywater@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

I always thought that habitat67 was a good example of how to do add density in a way that didn't feel dense. It's too bad this never got further than Expo 67.

[+] masterspace@lemmy.ca -8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Feels like a bit of a disingenuous article when it won't openly talk about the downsides of density. The downtown core of Toronto got denser and it got completely soulless. It's tower after tower that block daylight from reaching street level, leaving no sunlight but for those living at the top, and endless stretches of shoebox apartments where you're lucky if you get a balcony. There's no independent shops left and all the real estate is owned by massive corporations and banks that are always trying to extract as much money as possible from their tenants.

Their solution of bowling over all single family housing to replace with midrise apartments is also not exactly going to be popular.

I get that we need to density and we need land reform but your proposal is going to have a real hard time gaining traction if it boils down to "let's tear down everything here that all the existing residents chose and replace it with something else that we think is more logical".

[–] RehRomano@lemmy.ca 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

“let’s tear down everything here that all the existing residents chose and replace it with something else that we think is more logical”.

This feels like a dishonest interpretation that misses a lot of the nuance presented in the article.

[–] SamuelRJankis@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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. "

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

From this sentence preceding it where they're describing their optimal density model:

Density in Paris is constant and spread out, with plenty of six- to 10-storey apartments; one thing you won’t find, though, are detached homes and smaller buildings.

[–] huginn@feddit.it 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah but midrise apartments are by definition more popular?

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca -5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] huginn@feddit.it 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca -5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Who gives a fuck about rich nimby dickheads who would rather see people homeless than see people housed?

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.

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.

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.

[–] frostbiker@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Rocket@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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?

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] frostbiker@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] Rocket@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Why can I struggle to barely afford a condo

"I" is the first thing that stands out. It took two in both other cases.

despite making more than all of them combined by this point in their career?

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.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago

Some arbitrary number might be larger, but what makes you think you are actually making more than them?

Knowing our salaries adjusted for inflation and/or cost of living, the numbers aren't that close.

For example, in your grandparents’ time, food was around 50% of the average family’s budget. 30% in your parent’s time. Today, 10%.

In my grandparent's time a family budget consisted of 40 hours of salaried labour a week, today it consists of 80.

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.

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.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Again, not to the people who already live in neighbourhoods comprised of single family homes.

You got yours, so F everyone else? Classic ladder-yanker prattle.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

one thing you won’t find, though, are detached homes and smaller buildings.

Ah, so Paris grew up.

[–] pbjamm@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Seriously. In most cases residents did not choose large swaths of single family home suburbs, the planning commission did by zoning everything R1 and washing their hands of it.

[–] Smk@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago

Density shouldn't be big tower. It should be 4-5 story building very close together.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago

The downtown core of Toronto got denser and it got completely soulless. It’s tower after tower that block daylight from reaching street level, leaving no sunlight but for those living at the top, and endless stretches of shoebox apartments where you’re lucky if you get a balcony.

Sorry kid. You can't have space AND fit people as well. Since every rooftop needs to be a garden, at least that's a nice place to hang out.

You can't solve it by mid-ride or low-boys, either -- you need the economies of scale and minimal-density to save on infrastructure; and get better transit that is sufficient on property taxes before the user-pay system and road-tax ideas both die. Because no one's paying for the absolute shit Translink pulled these last few years. You need the high density to create and maintain the shared greenspace between the clusters, so it doesn't end up looking like Detroit or Jersey. You need the high densite to get that land BACK, as well as pull people out of the delta where we NEED that land for responsible local farming. (didn't think of that in your mid-rise plan, did you?)

Sorry. Towers are the reality if you want to live in the cities -- just, if we do it right, with greenways of sanity to break up the tower clusters and cool things down.. Kitimat's nice, though.