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
“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.