I don’t usually do this here. Or maybe I do? I’m still figuring out what I’m doing with this thing. But a recent Globe & Mail column has spurred a lively debate on the future of the suburbs - a topic that motivated this whole endeavor. Naturally, I have some thoughts.
Globe & Mail columnist John Ibbitson’s recent column Politicians Need to Remember That This is a Suburban, Car-Commuting Nation unsurprisingly got some attention from urbanist Twitter. Given the title, it might surprise you to hear that I generally agree with the premise.
Like it or not, that is the reality of current day Canada. Moreover, the typical North American family is enamored with the suburban ideal. Urbanists may not like it, but the dream of detached home ownership - or something like it - isn’t going away any time soon. Politicians ignore this at their peril.
However, I’ll argue that our current growth patterns were not the inevitable result of consumer choices, that we’re hitting the limits of auto-oriented sprawl in Canada’s largest metropolitan areas, and that tomorrow’s suburbs probably won’t be exclusively car-oriented.
Ibbitson’s argument, as I interpret it, rests on three key pillars.
Liberal politicians increasingly ignore the suburbs and abhor suburban development.
While there are downsides to suburban sprawl (pollution, infrastructure costs, detrimental health outcomes), they do ultimately provide a decent quality of life for families, and that is the bottom line for most people.
Meeting Canada’s housing demand “means building cities out.”
I largely agree with points one and two. Point three, I’ll push back on a bit.
People often assume that sprawling subdivisions are a free-market outcome. In reality, the suburbs as we know them are the product of heavy handed government regulations like single-family zoning and heavy investments in direct financing of post war homes and indirect subsidies through infrastructure spending.
I don’t think that Mr. Ibbitson would disagree with that (he notes, for instance, the cost of infrastructure required to build and sustain the suburbs), but it’s worth laying down that marker since it’s pretty common for people to claim that density is some kind of social engineering, while sprawl is the natural human impulse. Mixed-use, moderately dense housing development has existed since the dawn of human civilization. It took governments to invent car-only suburbs.
Where I’ll start to actually disagree with the author is that sprawl will continue apace. I do think, for reasons that I’ll get into in future posts, that some sort of urban expansion is going to be inevitable. but I don’t think that cul-de-sacs are going to ever be the dominant form of housing expansion again. After all, we’re running up against some serious logistical limitations.
Let’s put aside the Greenbelt for a second. We’ll also ignore the costs of connecting infrastructure like highways. Suppose a future government was bent on reverting to the GTA’s old sprawly ways. Problem: traffic is already a nightmare. Funneling more cars into the Old City of Toronto isn’t going to work. Traffic is worse than it was pre-COVID, even with people only going to the office 2-3 days a week. Unless we start to tunnel new highways under the city at an unfathomable cost or knock down the very buildings that bring people and commerce downtown to widen roads, it’s just not clear how we’re going to get more cars into the city core, where the jobs are. Even if we did, we’d soon run into the Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: if you add more lanes you’ll get more cars, leaving congestion unchanged.
And, let’s be clear: current levels of congestion are brutal, even if they don’t get worse (which they almost certainly will. Here’s a little example. Milton, Ontario is one of the fastest growing Canadian suburbs. I just checked Google Maps how long it would take to get from the heart of the Canadian economy to Milton at 3pm on a Thursday. An hour and eleven minutes. Not great. Add tens of thousands more cars heading into Toronto each year, and it gets much worse.
Now, here’s where I go back to potentially agreeing with the author (you can’t fully know a man based on a column!): most families do want something approaching suburban housing, and it will come whether urbanists really want it to or not (note: most of us aren’t actually against detached housing). I just don’t think it’s going to be quite as car-oriented and uniform as it is now.
There are a lot of reasons to expect change. For one thing, federal housing Minister Sean Fraser is going around the country ending single-family only zoning one city at a time. He’s also got competition. Provincial governments are making their own moves, particularly in British Columbia where Ravi Kahlon is busy setting the standard for housing policy reform in North America. The days of developers being legally limited to building either subdivisions or high rises1 is coming to an end.
Moreover, attitudes are changing. The ideal of a backyard and a decent amount of square footage still prevails among Millennials. Only, it looks a bit different than it used to - at least in the GTA, the Lower Mainland, and Greater Montreal, which account for more than a third of the population and around half of the country’s job growth. Young professionals on Bay Street who can afford their pick of neighborhoods (or could, before the housing crisis got truly out of hand) gravitate towards inner-ring suburbs like my neighbourhood, Leslieville. Duplexes around here routinely go for over a million dollars.2 In other words, around the same price as a large detached house in Milton. Even as Millenials age, we still seem to value walkable amenities more than Baby Boomers did. I’m betting that Gen-Z will continue this trend towards prefering more traditional, mixed-use neighbourhoods.
That isn’t to say the suburbs are going to die. But they’ll have to adapt.
Legalizing fourplexes will help add incremental housing units that can offer an alternative to apartment living at a lower cost. We can also make suburbs les stiflingly car dependent. I spent my childhood living in various suburbs. Those suburbs tended to have amenities like convenience stores and restaurants within walking distance, largely because there was still land available to build suburbs near mainstreets. There’s no reason we can’t incorporate more commerce into suburban areas, if we legalize it.
We can also make it easier to get around suburbs by incorporating better sidewalks and more bike paths - a trend there’s at least anecdotal evidence for - and to commute by transit all or part of the way to work. Ontario is building out the GO Train network, for instance. That presents opportunities not only for density near the stations, but for people to park and ride into the city (much like you see in the New York Metro Area). The automobile will always be part of the suburban experience for most people, but it doesn’t have to be the dominant part. We were made for better things than sitting in traffic.
Anyways, the author made an important point that people are often reluctant to admit: the suburbs are here to stay. He’s right that urbanists and liberal politicians need to recognize this. But, where I’ll perhaps differ, is that the recent car-only suburban trend is going to last. I think we’ll return to more traditional mixed-use suburban communities. The kids nowadays, after all, value convenience. There’s nothing less convenient than having to fight traffic to grab a coffee.
Technically, developers could choose to build more townhouses and other forms of gentle density in neighbourhoods zoned for high rises. In practice, it would be impractical to impossible in many cases given the magnitude of Canada’s housing shortage and the steep land costs created by exclusionary zoning.
No, I don’t own one of the million and a half dollar row houses around here. I’m a renter.