Much of the productivity of North America’s most economically vibrant cities is wasted on the rents of artificially scarce housing. Affordability issues tear growing cities apart. It’s about time to think a bit bigger about how to reshape our cities so there’s enough room for everyone; cities can’t keep trying the same thing and expecting the results to be better.
The dysfunctional scenario of North American city growth follows a familiar pattern. In a growing city with high demand and high land values, a developer proposes to replace some houses or a parking lot with a higher-density building. Often the city doesn’t allow for much density increase. But even if it does, zoning codes are so prescriptive that the project usually still needs a zoning variance to make sense. And in some cities, building approvals involve a public process.
A nearby neighbourhood of single detached houses invariably mounts a campaign to stop it, with a combination of real and imagined worries. These can include parking and traffic concerns, shadow impacts, and vague talk about heritage — along with a usually implicit fear that people of different race or class would move into the neighbourhood. Sometimes the existing residents stop it altogether, other times the developer reduces the height and density, adds more parking, and it gets approved. This process takes longer than it should, dramatically increases the costs of new construction, and creates more parking and traffic than needed.
Opposition is easy and natural. A nearby property getting approved for redevelopment carries with it the perceived certainty of negative impact for an existing homeowner, and no sense of positive impact.
There are rarely effective voices in support of new builds. Many neighbours might not mind, but neither do they have any stake in the project being approved. In some communities YIMBY (yes in my backyard) groups have formed for this purpose, but their opinion is likely to be discounted compared to those of the neighbours.
Generally the constituency for new construction doesn’t exist until people start living in it. So why not create a constituency for growth, right in a neighbourhood?
Currently cities target busy streets or intersections for higher density construction, preferring to preserve adjacent low-density residential neighbourhoods in their current state. This is the planning fiction of stable neighbourhoods, which cities studiously protect from any possible land-use threats, ostensibly in the interests of family and community. The reality is that as demand and land value increases in growing cities, these areas become much less affordable over time and see substantial population change. And over the decades since their construction, household sizes have shrunk, sometimes making areas like this bizarre zones of population decline right in the middle of cities experiencing severe housing affordability issues.
My suggestion is simple: upzone an entire neighbourhood, not just the main streets. Involve the neighbourhood in the planning process to create a family-friendly but denser urban space, to figure out the amenities and public space that should get created, and to perhaps maintain some design harmony between old and new. Some neighbourhoods might be more receptive to this, and the city can focus on a few of them, leaving the rest to miss out on the opportunity.
The key is that all of the existing properties would have the ability to redevelop with more density, or to sell at a profit to someone who would. Those who recognize the opportunity would form a constituency in favour of the change, and the reception to the changes as a whole would not be one-sided.
This idea is motivated by the example I recently described of a neighbourhood transformation in Waterloo, Ontario, but I believe that there’s many prime candidates in cities like San Francisco, Toronto, and Vancouver.
Apart from the stale dogma of stable neighbourhoods, the biggest challenge I see is that in many or most jurisdictions, property taxes are based on an assessment of the “highest and best use”. Without changing the rules around property taxation, there wouldn’t be a way for prior homeowners to remain without paying more taxes for their newly appreciated property. This is a policy barrier to making zoning more flexible, and a fix might allow for some grace period to ease in the higher valuation for a property if it’s the same owner and the use hasn’t changed. However, in high-demand urban areas, this barrier shouldn’t stop cities from considering this approach.
Many growing North American cities with housing affordability issues are full of reasonably central, low-density residential neighbourhoods. They can accommodate many more people if owners in those neighbourhoods are given a personal interest in seeing change happen.
