$30 to get a list of stupid things, no thanks.
In the end, the “dumbest excuse” isn’t a dumb excuse at all. The video author just doesn’t like it. Furthermore, the video author mischaracterizes the argument somewhat.
The unspoken part of the “so big!” argument is “for the number of people there”.
The EU is 4.4 million km2 containing 447 million people.
The US’s 48 contiguous states make up 7.6 million km2, containing 328 million people.
Canada is 9 million km2, containing 37 million people.
He pointed out that Japan is the size of the Greater Toronto Area, but when he self-righteously points out “HALF OF CANADIANS LIVE IN THIS AREA!”, he neglects to mention 2 important things:
- Half of Canadians is still only 18 million people, meaning that this area the size of Japan has 10 times fewer people
- There’s lots of rail, streetcars, and buses in the Toronto region.
He similarly smugly points out the rail network in china – A country with roughly the same land mass as Canada, but a population of 1,400 million people – roughly 37x as many people.
There’s another problem: This guy thinks all cities should be planned with high density housing and all these other things. There’s a big problem with cities trying to do that: When there’s lots of space, people aren’t going to go by your plans. High density housing is a result of lack of space, not a result of brilliant planning by handsome and suave rogue city planners.
People have different priorities. Sometimes the same person can have much different priorities as they age. A young person might want a cheap place to live near lots of exciting things to do. A family might want room to play in the back yard, a shop to work on projects, a garage, a few bedrooms. Empty nesters might want a quiet condo they can enjoy without too much work keeping up the place. Near the end of people’s lives, they might actually like something more like a retirement home (though care homes themselves aren’t the best example) so they can be around other people and get the help they need in their twilight years.
So what happens when people enter a new stage of life and they can’t get the thing they want where they’re living? They go somewhere that does have it. That’s how the suburbs came to be, because post-war, people raising families wanted to have space. The cities didn’t have space, so they left for these new suburbs that weren’t in the cities. Many cities started to rot from the inside, because people with money didn’t want these places, so the high density housing quickly became high density of poverty. Unlike the middle class people who moved to the suburbs, the poverty stricken inner city dwellers didn’t have a bunch of money to pay a bunch of taxes or support a bunch of businesses, so that became a problem cities in America had to figure out.
Since you need to fill high density buildings, and if it’s possible people who want more space will simply move if they can’t get it in their high density urban environments, high density buildings end up being effective when space is at a premium and people in the middle and lower upper classes can’t reasonably get space anywhere anyway. In that case, people will live in the high density housing. Otherwise, just popping down high density buildings like a simcity game gone wrong will lead to urban sprawl as the middle and upper classes flee the city and the problems of high density housing filled with low income tenants.
Two examples of cities where sprawl stopped being effective and high density housing became the norm are in fact Toronto and Vancouver. In both cases, the cost of a single family home surpassed 1 million dollars, and so rather than build homes nobody could afford, high density housing could provide condominiums that were still affordable for regular people.
Ironically given the original subject matter, such high density housing often has astronomical costs for parking, so there is a massive incentive (I’ve heard in Toronto and Vancouver a parking spot can go for $100k in some neighborhoods) to not rely on personal motor vehicles.
In spite of these facts about Toronto and Vancouver, some people nonetheless choose to make massive commutes from hours away so they can enjoy the benefits of working in the city and the benefits of having a single family home or at least a townhouse so they can have the benefits of some space.
Personally, I would prefer more smaller cities where people can live more simply. There are still cities in the world where you can own a home and also bicycle to work.
