By Helen LuiWe constantly hear about the problems with density: tiny shoeboxes in the sky, looming towers and their shadows, traffic congestion, and overcrowding. But despite popular discourse, denser living can actually be good for us and our communities.Density as healthDensity brings public services, transit, parks, and amenities closer together. When we can walk our
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”.
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.
“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.
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.
Ah, so Paris grew up.
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.
Density shouldn’t be big tower. It should be 4-5 story building very close together.
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.