> Let's just make housing a human right and that'll do it.
How would that right read? Maybe “Every Canadian has the right to housing in the desirable neighborhoods of Toronto”? I’m not sure if that is really feasible.
How would that right read? Maybe “Every Canadian has the right to housing in the desirable neighborhoods of Toronto”? I’m not sure if that is really feasible.
We're sliding towards workhouses of the 1800s. Policy should lean towards a one bedroom apartment being achievable for all of the working class.
“Every Canadian has a right to negotiate to rent or buy housing in any neighbourhood in Canada”
“Every Canadian has the right to build as much housing as they want in any neighborhood in Canada.”
More pithily, if we want housing to be a human right, then building housing also has to be a human right, one that cannot be vetoed away because your neighbours don’t like it.
Ofc not everyone gets what they want, and not everyone can live in Shaughnessy or Mount Royal. But it does not follow from this that it makes sense to ban all forms of buildings except houses, like we do now, on most land in all cities in North America.
More density is great, I’m not against that. Making the government support that is also a good idea (via transit and utility build out). But after it’s done, Toronto will probably only be as affordable as Hong Kong where that’s already done, where even a substandard cafe will set you back. Or maybe Tokyo, which is more sane (you can get a 2 tatami unheated room for $500/month, FYI I would love to live in Tokyo).
There are all sorts of reasons we might want to coordinate infrastructure with building, and I invite smart urban planners to focus on exactly that, on equitable ways to do that, rather than aligning with anti-city forces to block hauling that people want to live in.
Very little of today’s zoning was design to align housing with infrastructure. Most if it was simply designed to exclude and to keep housing expensive.
We can ditch the latter and keep the former.
I’m still for it (I personally like living in dense cities), but I don’t think it will help housing affordability. It’s like expanding a highway to reduce traffic, but it doesn’t because it induces more demand instead (I’m not the only one who likes living in dense cities).
Re: housing and freeways - this only works up to a point. Cars and freeways have strong negative externalities - they destroy the very notion of what a city is, they make it miserable, noisy, unsafe, and expensive. Buildings don’t do any of that, they just sit there quietly, so there’s much less reason to try to keep the supply of buildings small, unlike freeway infrastructure.
Ofc some ppl who dislike cities may suggest that a single small apartment building destroys the thing they like most - the lack of people, which is understandable to a certain extent, but difficult to defend. If we are go there then we just end up with an endless circle of people pointing at each other saying, “I’m allowed to live here but you aren’t”
There is something to be said for a city with extra housing as well as desirability at the same time, like Berlin a decade or two ago. But that never lasts, and eventually an equilibrium is reached, equilibriums always occur in the long run.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Hong-Kong-have-so-much-undeve...