Numbers show the ’burbs are where it’s at
Acouple of years ago I wrote what I thought was a fine column talking about how pleasant life can be in the Lower Mainland ’burbs with a sizable lot, a sizzling barbecue and some room to breath.
I described how wrong it was for eco-density-obsessed politicians, academics and urban planners to keep railing against “suburban sprawl” as if it were some form of disease.
For many Lower Mainland residents, I wrote, the dream was not to live in a shiny condo in Vancouver’s West End or the Olympic Village. They’d much prefer a spacious home in the Fraser Valley with a backyard, approachable neighbours and some trees for their kids to climb.
Not everyone agreed. Indeed, blogger Andrew Barton of New Westminster later dubbed my column “one of the most ill-informed, ideological, disingenuous pieces of twaddle I’ve ever encountered in a major newspaper.”
This wounded me deeply. But I have healed now. And I am happy to report almost total vindication for my views from a new study showing nearly all of Canada’s population growth in recent years has taken place not in the trendy, latte-sipping urban cores of its largest cities, but in their continually vilified suburbs.
Indeed, from 2006 to 2011, the ’burbs accounted for 87 per cent of Metro Vancouver’s population growth.
The study, by vastly experienced public policy consultant Wendell Cox, of St. Louis-based Demographia, showed that this growth comes despite anti-suburban government policies that outlaw development on large tracts of land.
So, green zealots, “smart-growth” pundits and self-described “transit nerds” like Barton can try as hard as they like to densify and condoize Canadians. But Canadians are voting with their feet or at least their cars.
They aren’t sticking around downtown in a vain attempt to curb their carbon footprint; they’re heading to the ’burbs. And that’s no twaddle.
Folks want the backyard barbecue and the white picket fence. They want affordable housing.
“The sad thing about it is that we’re being told how to live by people who really have no right to do that,” Cox told me Tuesday.
Cox says drawing an “urban growth boundary” around cities like Vancouver drives housing prices through the roof, meaning young people can’t afford homes. “Vancouver in my mind has some of the most radical land-use policies in the western world,” he said.
Cox also believes that, instead of trying to force people to take public transit, governments should be building more suburban roads.
“One of the problems with both Canadian and American planners is they believe that, by not building highways and forcing up densities, you reduce traffic congestion,” he said. “That is absolutely not true.”
The truth is, he says, that having more highways reduces traffic congestion, air pollution and commuting times. It also makes cities more economically productive.
The bottom line? As I said in my last column on this issue, Lower Mainland community leaders need to stop fixating on the supposed virtues of densification and downtown living . . . and start sticking up for the ’burbs. After all, that’s where most of us live.