It turns out cram­ming more peo­ple into cities won’t help the envi­ron­ment or our health, and may even hurt the economy

Tam­sin McMa­hon – Macleans

Last month Toronto’s deputy mayor, Doug Holy­day, uttered what has become a cul­tural taboo in Canada’s largest city. Down­town Toronto, he said, is no place to raise a family.

Holy­day, who lives down the street from his grand­chil­dren in the sub­ur­ban Toronto neigh­bour­hood of Eto­bi­coke, was against a city plan to force condo devel­op­ers to reserve 10% of their build­ings for three-bedroom “fam­ily friendly” units.

“I could just see now: ‘Where’s lit­tle Ginny?’ ” he said. “She’s down­stairs play­ing in the traf­fic on her way to the park.”

His com­ments were swiftly denounced by Adam Vaughan, the down­town coun­cil­lor who had been push­ing for the family-friendly condo units and once proudly told a reporter he had never vis­ited the sub­urbs around Toronto. (“There’s Toronto and there’s the rest of Canada,” he said.)

Holyday’s view was hardly orig­i­nal, but was so shock­ing because of how it flew in the face of what has become accepted wis­dom in cities across the coun­try: we need to rad­i­cally increase the num­ber of peo­ple liv­ing in the down­town core if we’re going to accom­mo­date pop­u­la­tion growth while end­ing urban sprawl.

The doc­trine of urban inten­si­fi­ca­tion is already hav­ing a dra­matic effect on the condo-lined sky­lines of cities like Toronto and Van­cou­ver, but the debate has been play­ing out across the coun­try with com­mu­ni­ties as dis­parate as Miramichi, N.B., Saska­toon and Cal­gary all wring­ing their hands about how to stop the relent­less march to the suburbs.

In July, Rev­el­stoke, B.C., passed a law requir­ing the city to cut green­house gas emis­sions by 15% by 2030, in part by encour­ag­ing high-density development.

Saska­toon is plan­ning to turn a for­mer dog park in a low-density neigh­bour­hood of Sec­ond World War hous­ing into nine apart­ment build­ings. The city also has plans to rede­velop 97 hectares of indus­trial land in the north down­town into a mixed-use devel­op­ment that could house 6,000 peo­ple and five mil­lion square feet of retail and com­mer­cial space. Some argued the city didn’t go far enough, with coun­cil­lor Myles Heidt telling the Saska­toon Star-Phoenix the devel­op­ment should strive for “extra-high den­sity” capa­ble of hous­ing up to 30,000 peo­ple, or nearly 13% of the city’s cur­rent population.

Miramichi’s new devel­op­ment plan calls for more multi-unit hous­ing. Cal­gary, con­sid­ered the epit­ome of the Cana­dian car-centric city, recently hired an urban plan­ner whose per­sonal motto is: “No place is worth vis­it­ing that doesn’t have a park­ing problem.”

After decades of watch­ing North Amer­i­can cities gut­ted by res­i­dents flee­ing to the leafy sub­urbs, urban enthu­si­asts are now declar­ing an end to low-density development.

In the eyes of many city plan­ners and polit­i­cal lead­ers, the sub­ur­ban ideal of the single-detached house on a quiet cul-de-sac, com­plete with a large yard and the req­ui­site lengthy com­mute, is a relic of a bygone and largely unsus­tain­able era. In its place, they are push­ing for “smart growth” com­mu­ni­ties fea­tur­ing high-density housing-usually in the form of apart­ment and condo complexes-in mixed-use neigh­bour­hoods where every­one walks, bikes or takes the bus. It’s the only way, we’re told, to han­dle our rapid pop­u­la­tion growth with­out destroy­ing the envi­ron­ment and clog­ging streets with traffic.

Urban plan­ners have been hotly debat­ing how to cope with sprawl-or whether we even need to cope with it at all-for decades. But the smart-growth move­ment has picked up steam over the past decade as envi­ron­men­tal­ists con­cerned about global warm­ing pointed the fin­ger squarely at the sub­ur­ban com­muter for con­tribut­ing to cli­mate change.

But a grow­ing body of crit­ics is argu­ing that far from rais­ing our qual­ity of liv­ing, green­ing our envi­ron­ment and mak­ing us all walk more and drive less, the kind of rad­i­cal inten­si­fi­ca­tion plans now in vogue with urban plan­ners are dam­ag­ing our economies, rais­ing our cost of liv­ing and fail­ing to get peo­ple out of their cars and onto pub­lic tran­sit. What we need, they say, is a much more thought­ful debate over how to live beyond the push to cram more peo­ple into ever-smaller spaces.

“The whole dia­logue on den­sity is too focused on num­bers rather than being focused on what den­sity can actu­ally offer,” says Pierre Fil­ion, an urban plan­ner at the Uni­ver­sity of Water­loo. “What is impor­tant is, what kind of envi­ron­ment are you going to cre­ate? This is as much, if not even more impor­tant than grow­ing density.”

The con­cept of smart growth, with its belief in densely pop­u­lated mixed-use neigh­bour­hoods, has long been linked to the ideas of Jane Jacobs, the Amer­i­can urban plan­ner whose The Death and Life of Great Amer­i­can Cities called for a return to a live­able urban com­mu­nity. But Jacobs decried neigh­bour­hoods full of high-rise build­ings and wor­ried that den­sity, if left unchecked, could “begin to repress diver­sity instead of stim­u­late it.” Instead, urban plan­ning his­to­ri­ans point out that the modern-day smart-growth move­ment looks much more like the ideas of George Dantzig and Thomas Saaty, two Amer­i­can math­e­mati­cians who in 1973 devel­oped a series of com­puter mod­els for the ideal urban set­ting, which they termed the “com­pact city.”

“Effec­tive use of the ver­ti­cal dimen­sion,” they argued, could solve a host of prob­lems fac­ing the growth city, among them: “smog, traf­fic, time lost in com­mut­ing, acci­dents, slums, noise, pol­lu­tion, inac­ces­si­ble nature, unsafe walks and play areas, end­less chauf­feur­ing of chil­dren and ris­ing cost.”

“Our claim,” they wrote, “is that it is now cheaper to build land than to go out and rob nature.”

Dantzig and Saaty’s belief that dras­ti­cally increas­ing the pop­u­la­tion den­sity of our cities was the only way to solve a host of envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems has become a cen­tral tenet of the modern-day smart-growth move­ment. Sup­port­ers argue that build­ing up our cities and sub­urbs will cut down on green­house gas emis­sions by short­en­ing our com­mutes and encour­ag­ing more of us to take pub­lic tran­sit to work or walk.

It would be nice to think that sim­ply hav­ing more peo­ple live close together down­town would make peo­ple, par­tic­u­larly chil­dren, health­ier. Less time spent in cars, the think­ing goes, means more time walk­ing to nearby gro­cery stores, play­grounds and schools. But when researchers from the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, North­east­ern Uni­ver­sity, and Berke­ley tracked the phys­i­cal activ­ity of chil­dren aged nine to 11 who had moved to smart-growth com­mu­ni­ties and com­pared them with chil­dren in tra­di­tional sub­urbs, they found lit­tle evi­dence of a great shift. Chil­dren in smart-growth com­mu­ni­ties tended to play more out­doors, usu­ally in their neigh­bour­hood, while chil­dren in the sub­urbs played more indoors, the study found. But it con­cluded that “increases in daily moderate-to-vigorous phys­i­cal activ­ity did not sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer by group.” In other words, chil­dren who moved to smart-growth com­mu­ni­ties changed where they played, but not how much.

Another study out of the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia exam­ined the core prin­ci­ples of smart growth to see whether any of them actu­ally had any influ­ence on rates of phys­i­cal activ­ity. The only ones that did, they found, were poli­cies pro­mot­ing more open space and those that advo­cated for “dis­tinc­tive com­mu­ni­ties with a strong sense of place,” nei­ther of which are par­tic­u­larly linked to density.

Aside from fail­ing to make us any health­ier, there’s mount­ing evi­dence that smart growth doesn’t live up to the hype when it comes to improv­ing the phys­i­cal state of the envi­ron­ment, either.

A 2009 study from the Geor­gia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy and the Uni­ver­sity of Wisconsin-Madison mod­elled what smart-growth devel­op­ment would do to green­house gas emis­sions by 2050 and found that “aggres­sive” smart growth that included rad­i­cal inten­si­fi­ca­tion could reduce car­bon emis­sions by eight%. On the other hand, forc­ing every­one to drive hybrid vehi­cles, even if on lengthy com­mutes to the burbs, could cut emis­sions by 18%.

Researchers found increas­ing pop­u­la­tion den­sity has not been suc­cess­ful at get­ting peo­ple out of their cars and onto pub­lic tran­sit. That’s because pop­u­la­tion den­sity has lit­tle to do with how peo­ple choose to get to work and almost no asso­ci­a­tion with lev­els of pub­lic tran­sit ridership.

By the sim­ple mea­sure of res­i­dents per hectare, Los Ange­les is North America’s most densely pop­u­lated met­ro­pol­i­tan region, with 27.3 peo­ple per hectare, thanks to its com­pact sub­urbs all con­nected by a net­work of free­ways. Yet more than 90% of its pop­u­la­tion mainly trav­els by car and less than five% by pub­lic tran­sit. That com­pares to Edmon­ton, which houses just 10.1 peo­ple per hectare, but has nearly dou­ble the pro­por­tion of res­i­dents who take tran­sit. Even in Port­land, Ore., a city fre­quently touted by Cana­dian urban plan­ners as the gold stan­dard for smart growth because of its mas­sive invest­ments in light-rail tran­sit and down­town rede­vel­op­ment, 89.4% of res­i­dents still pre­fer to drive to work. In Cal­gary, it’s 76.6%.

“I don’t think den­sity has very much to do with the suc­cess of pub­lic tran­sit,” says Paul Mees, a trans­porta­tion plan­ning pro­fes­sor at Royal Mel­bourne Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy in Aus­tralia. “I think that’s the urban myth that is really hold­ing back progress.”

That idea, that cities need to be jam-packed with peo­ple in order for tran­sit to be viable, first emerged in the 1950s as a way to advo­cate for more spend­ing on roads and high­ways, says Mees. A Chicago trans­porta­tion study at that time deter­mined the region would need 96.5 res­i­dents per hectare (more than three times the pop­u­la­tion den­sity of present-day Toronto) to sup­port pub­lic tran­sit to its sub­urbs, a cal­cu­la­tion that con­tin­ues to hold sway over city plan­ners today. Instead, Mees argues the actual den­sity needed to pro­vide sus­tain­able pub­lic tran­sit is prob­a­bly closer to one where most peo­ple live on lots of 647 sq. m with a well-defined urban bound­ary to keep houses from sprawl­ing ran­domly into the coun­try­side. In other words, tra­di­tional sub­ur­bia. “That seems to be almost all of Canada,” he says.

While Toronto’s city coun­cil was engulfed in a debate over the need for more family-friendly, three-bedroom con­dos in the city’s down­town, the Toronto Real Estate Board released a report that said just 19 three-bedroom con­dos were sold in the down­town core in the sec­ond quar­ter of the year. The con­dos aver­aged around $800,000, hardly a family-friendly price tag.

Real estate prices inevitably rise in tan­dem with pop­u­la­tion density-one of the main rea­sons, smart-growth crit­ics say, that poli­cies to stop sprawl by increas­ing den­sity in our cities and sub­urbs are des­tined to fail. The more peo­ple you try to cram into a city, the more expen­sive real estate gets, and the more peo­ple are inclined to flee to the sub­urbs for more afford­able hous­ing. In fact, a study released in May from Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity in the U.K. found that dra­mat­i­cally increas­ing urban den­sity might reduce car use by a mere five%, but the envi­ron­men­tal gains from that reduc­tion would be dwarfed by the eco­nomic con­se­quences of mak­ing cities more expen­sive places to live and do busi­ness. “Any econ­o­mist will know when you restrict the sup­ply of a good that is in demand, you drive up the cost,” says Wen­dell Cox of the U.S. urban pol­icy con­sul­tancy Demographia and a vocal critic of the push for urban inten­si­fi­ca­tion. “If we can fig­ure out a way to do smart growth with­out rationing land, it might be a good idea.”

It’s not only fam­i­lies who have been flee­ing to the sub­urbs as land prices in the city sky­rocket, jobs have also migrated, lead­ing to what’s been dubbed “job sprawl.”

For instance, down­town Toronto is no longer the region’s largest employer, says Cox. More than 350,000 peo­ple work in the sprawl­ing area around Pear­son air­port, com­pared to 325,000 in down­town Toronto. Between 2001 and 2006, 94% of new jobs in the Toronto area were out­side of the cen­tral munic­i­pal­ity, he says, with rates of 70% in Mon­treal and 75% in Van­cou­ver. And as jobs have moved out of cities, down­town res­i­dents have fol­lowed them, lead­ing to the increas­ingly com­mon phe­nom­e­non of the “reverse com­mute,” where res­i­dents leave their homes in the city to drive to work in the sub­urbs. Nearly a third of the com­muter traf­fic in and out of Toronto as of 2006 involved city res­i­dents head­ing to jobs in the sub­urbs. Almost as many Toron­to­ni­ans com­muted to Vaughan, a sub­urb north of the city, as com­muted from Vaughan into the city. In Van­cou­ver in 2006, more than 40% of com­muter traf­fic was doing a reverse com­mute; in Mon­treal it was 23%.

Lisa Anttila is one of those reverse com­muters. She lives in down­town Toronto, where she bikes to the gro­cery store and the doctor’s office. But she gets in the car to go to work at her family’s busi­ness man­u­fac­tur­ing stain­less steel prod­ucts in Markham, a sub­urb north of the city. Most days her work sched­ule is flex­i­ble enough that she can time the com­mute to avoid traf­fic, but that has become more dif­fi­cult in the six years she’s been doing the drive. “It used to be, ‘Don’t get on the road between 7:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m.’ Now it’s like if you haven’t left by 7:30 then you’re pretty much wait­ing until after 10,” she says. “Iron­i­cally it seems like half the peo­ple who live [in Markham] come to Toronto to work and so they fill the jobs with peo­ple from Toronto.”

At its worst, Anttila’s 18-km reverse com­mute can now take nearly 90 min­utes by car. Pub­lic tran­sit, she says, is not an option. “It takes me longer on pub­lic tran­sit than it does by bicy­cle,” she says.

Smart-growth devel­op­ment is unlikely to reverse that trend. Researchers from East Car­olina Uni­ver­sity stud­ied what hap­pened to jobs in 350 U.S. met­ro­pol­i­tan regions between 2001 and 2006, com­par­ing those that had restric­tions on sprawl with those that didn’t.

Eight of the 11 cities with anti-sprawl laws had “job sprawl” rates that were worse than the aver­age. Bend, Ore., a city that under­went mas­sive mixed-use rede­vel­op­ment before being slammed by the finan­cial melt­down, fared four times worse than the national aver­age. Mean­while, some low-density cities in Texas, Ten­nessee and South Car­olina had actu­ally man­aged to attract more jobs than they lost to the suburbs.

The fact that more den­sity can’t deliver a bet­ter com­mute to work and can even make con­ges­tion worse, is one of the biggest eco­nomic argu­ments against urban inten­si­fi­ca­tion, Cox says. “The only rea­son peo­ple move to cities is to do bet­ter because the oppor­tu­ni­ties in cities are bet­ter,” he says. “If peo­ple don’t begin to real­ize what they’re doing to really nice cities, you could very well in the long run see growth pushed out of them.”

Those munic­i­pal­i­ties that do embrace smart growth have been doing it at the expense of indus­trial devel­op­ment, pre­fer­ring to con­vert fac­tory zones into areas for hous­ing. And that is doing last­ing dam­age to the abil­ity of cities to cre­ate enough jobs for their fast-growing pop­u­la­tions, says Nancey Green Leigh, a brown­field rede­vel­op­ment expert with Geor­gia Tech Uni­ver­sity. She stud­ied the indus­trial devel­op­ment poli­cies of 14 major U.S. cities and 10 smart-growth regions and found smart-growth plan­ning either ignored the needs of indus­try or saw it as a blight on the urban land­scape. Man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs were van­ish­ing from North Amer­i­can cities long before the advent of smart growth. But Green Leigh says the push for urban inten­si­fi­ca­tion has aggra­vated that trend. Once old indus­trial land gets con­verted to con­do­mini­ums, it’s never long before new condo dwellers begin to demand that any remain­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers and fac­to­ries be given the boot.

The loss of indus­trial land to con­dos, offices and retail com­plexes has become a prob­lem in B.C.’s Lower Main­land, where the port author­ity has run up against stiff oppo­si­tion to its plans to buy prop­er­ties for future indus­trial uses. Port Metro Van­cou­ver has recently pur­chased 142 hectares of land in the Lower Main­land to safe­guard for indus­trial use. But, CEO Robin Sil­vester says, provin­cial esti­mates point to the need for as many as 809 hectares of indus­trial land if the region is to stay eco­nom­i­cally com­pet­i­tive and avoid becom­ing a res­i­den­tial oasis for the wealthy and retired. And that has put the port on a col­li­sion course with those who believe the areas should be reserved for more urban liv­ing. “We need to have a bet­ter qual­ity of dis­cus­sion around the prob­lem that’s emerg­ing,” Sil­vester says. “Oth­er­wise we run the risk of becom­ing like com­mu­ni­ties in parts of Florida where a lot of peo­ple go to live, but where there’s no eco­nomic activ­ity tak­ing place.”

Van­cou­ver is per­haps Canada’s stark­est exam­ple of what hap­pens to real estate when a city becomes a place where every­one wants to live. But urban plan­ners across the coun­try are sin­gu­larly focused on end­ing sprawl. The irony is that the cur­rent obses­sion with smart growth may just become one more thing that pushes us, our fam­i­lies and our jobs, even far­ther into the burbs.

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Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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