Hold the Line, kill the dream
If you happen to be an urban planner, you better sit down. I’ve got some bad news.
“Canada,” a recent academic report declares, “is a suburban nation.”
More than two-thirds of all Canadians live in the suburbs — that unloved middle ground between dense, transit-rich downtown cores and sparsely populated rural areas.
And the suburban share is growing rapidly. According to the study, released by the Council for Canadian Urbanism and written by three urban planners at Queen’s University, almost all the growth in Canada over the past ten years has come from the burbs.
“Downtowns may be full of new condo towers, but there is five times as much population growth on the suburban edges,” they write of big cities. In fact, between 2006 and 2016, 75 per cent of all new growth in Canada has occurred in suburban areas, where having a car is a necessity for getting around.
In Waterloo Region, 72 per cent of all residents live in what the academics call ’auto suburbs’ — slightly above the national average. Only 11 per cent of us live in an ‘active core,’ where transit and walking are dominant — slightly below the national average.
For urban planners, transit advocates, bike nerds, downtown latté slurpers and assorted municipal politicians who enjoy lecturing the public on how and where they should live, travel and think, this is the worst news imaginable.
The soulless suburbs, we’re frequently told — and as the Queen’s report dutifully does — are responsible for untold social, environmental and economic calamities including long commute times, increased pollution and greenhouse gases, rising infrastructure costs, obesity, waste, and divisive populist politics. (Many of these complaints are false, or wildly overstated.)
Politicians respond to these anti-suburban claims with policies meant to push development away from the edges of cities toward downtown. Here we can include Waterloo Region’s famous ‘hard countryside line’ that prevents housing from sprawling onto nearby farmland, as well as our missing-in-action billion-dollar LRT.
You can hear that same urge for control echoing in Waterloo’s new zoning rules that curtail future parking accessibility because some city councillors are convinced driving is a sin. This in the face of evidence people are driving more and owning more cars than ever before.
Despite all the official effort to shove people away from the suburbs and out of their cars, however, they still flock to these areas. What explains this massive disconnect?
“The underlying philosophy of urban planning has always been that suburbs are bad,” says Murtaza Haider, an outspoken and iconoclastic professor of real estate at Ryerson University’s business school. “Suburbs are never recognized as a virtue.”
Yet it is impossible for something to be so wildly popular, and entirely without benefit.
Chief among the unspoken virtues of suburban living is price. “The suburbs are affordable,” observes Haider in an interview, pointing out rents in downtown Toronto are double those of its outlying areas. Anyone truly concerned about housing affordability should be a tireless advocate for more suburban development.
Besides being easier on the budget, a single family home with a garage, porch and yard for the kids to play in — what we might consider the suburban dream — also aligns perfectly with what most families actually want.
“Whenever you ask people what kind of house they’d like, the majority view — without exception — is a single-family detached home,” says Haider. A recent Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. survey of home buying intentions proves his point: 74 per cent of homeowners concur.
People like suburban living. They really, really like it. And policies designed to frustrate this dream will inevitable lead to many unpleasant and perverse outcomes.
Attendees of last weekend’s Hold the Line festival in celebration of Waterloo Region’s countryside line were loudly lauding its role in fighting urban sprawl. Yet they were also inadvertently celebrating a policy that reduces housing affordability, lengthens commute times, energizes populist politicians and generally makes families less happy.
Beyond artificially raising the price of housing by limiting supply, growth barriers such as the countryside line lead to ‘leapfrogging,’ in which people move over that line in order to find the single family home of their dreams.
Locally, this explains the move to places like New Hamburg and Ayr, which in turn leads to longer commutes and more pollution, as those countryside-line refugees must now drive farther back-and-forth to work.
There is also an important link between enforced urban density and unhappiness.
“Life is significantly less happy in urban areas,” concludes a study from the Vancouver School of Economics released earlier this year. The researchers found that density, housing cost and congestion are all correlated with lower self-reported happiness.
Finally, anyone who still feels hostility toward the suburbs should note how Ontario Premier Doug Ford won the recent provincial election on the strength of suburban voters, and by treating their interests with respect, rather than as a problem that needs to be fixed.
If politicians want to keep their electorate happy, they should stop lecturing them about the evils of suburban living and spend more time figuring out how to help them turn their dreams into reality.
The suburbs make people happy. Let’s build more of them.