Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy6
I don't understand why government doesn't try to discourage the growth of Toronto (or Vancouver etc.) by encouraging jobs to go elsewhere. Instead of adding population to cities that could use it and which have plentiful residential areas and affordable houses, everyone keeps squeezing into Toronto, creating a need for ridiculously expensive infrastructure upgrades and driving up the cost of houses to the point that you need to be a two-professional-income family to afford one.
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It's not really true that Toronto is attracting loads and loads of people relative to other Canadian cities. Toronto's annual growth rate is only
a bit above the Canadian average, and has been slowly declining for years.
As well, the city and the metropolitan area have negative interprovincial and intraprovincial migration. In other words: more people leave Toronto for smaller Ontario cities than move to Toronto from smaller Ontario cities, and more people leave Toronto for other provinces than vice-versa. It's only international immigration and births that are driving Toronto's growth. So people aren't "squeezing into" Toronto at a rate especially greater than other parts of Canada.
Regarding the main question of the thread: Whenever I hear the “give the people what they want” argument in regards to housing, I’m left to wonder why these preferences develop. There are few places on Earth where single-family living is the dominant housing typology, including North America until fairly recently. If Canadians are unable to even imagine another way of living, that strikes me as…well, a lack of imagination.
I remember visiting the Dutch countryside last year and being struck by the agricultural villages, extraordinarily compact and picturesque little places which were most composed of rowhouses and small apartment buildings, and which seemed ridiculously pleasant places to live. I doubt the residents are clamouring for big SFHs.
I enjoy my current set-up—a small rowhouse in a walkable urban neighbourhood. It’s not perfect, but it minimizes what I dislike about home ownership (property maintenance, especially of the landscaping variety) but provides some outdoor space beyond some crappy balcony, plus a more classically “homey” layout.
Anyway, I agree with those who say that it would simply be a terrible use of land in our already sprawling cities to accelerate single-family-home growth. There are lots of single-family homes already on the resale market, and we have to build other housing types. But: we have to build them better so more people see them as a viable lifestyle. The classic shoebox condo for the 25-35 set, or the investor set, isn’t the kind of “housing” we need, really. The typical Canadian condo certainly doesn't stack up, in terms of space or design, to the middle-class apartment houses of Paris and New York.
And where we do still build single-family homes, we can make those communities better by planning more linear and logical street layouts and encouraging walkability, but that’s planning 101. Single-family homes and windey cul-de-sacs don’t have to go hand-in-hand.